Rébecca Chaillon, who is on a trip to Belgium, steps into a room to take The Irish Times’s video call. The walls are white, and she appears silhouetted against the dim light coming through the window. It almost resembles a hideaway.
The French theatre-maker, whose play Whitewashing is part of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, couldn’t be blamed if she preferred to stay out of sight. Chaillon is coming off one of the most extreme reactions to a play in Europe in recent times. In 2023, when her extraordinary work Carte Noire Nommée Désir played at Avignon Festival, some of the audience became physically abusive, and she and her cast were then trolled online.
Chaillon, who has a reputation as one of French theatre’s greatest risk-takers, is used to ruffling feathers, but this response was like nothing she had ever experienced. “We took a lot of love and beautiful things from the audience, but at the same time we created violence for ourselves,” she says, still sounding understandably dismayed.
One of Chaillon’s first productions was a rewriting of Molière’s comedy Les Femmes Savantes, or The Learned Ladies, in 2009. She was keen to focus on its representation of women. “The first fight started with the actresses who said, ‘You’re doing bullshit.’ I said, ‘No, I just want to twist Molière and say my own thing,” she says.
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Chaillon had spent years performing with an amateur company in the medieval city of Beauvais, north of Paris. A kind of crash course in classical drama, it left her confident that she could turn Molière’s 17th-century play about Parisian aristocrats into a lively piece of gig theatre, removing its rhyming couplets, excising its male characters and changing the setting to the present day.
Chaillon’s priority now is making art about black women’s experiences and imagination; looking back, there’s one detail that amuses her about The Learned Ladies. “All the girls were white,” she says.
There was one exception; she invited Aurore Déon, an actor she met at college, and whom she worked alongside in an educational theatre company in Paris, to join the cast. “I felt a bit alone, and there was no other black woman, so I decided I needed a friend,” she says.
After The Learned Ladies she seized an opportunity to do a workshop with Rodrigo García, the pioneering Spanish-Argentinian director known for epically visceral displays, not unlike those of his Italian contemporary Romeo Castellucci.
Chaillon had met García in 2007, when he toured Arrojad Mis Cenizas Sobre Mickey, or Throw My Ashes on Mickey, an unpredictable spectacle about consumer culture, with a title nodding towards Disney’s Mickey Mouse. One scene required a different performer each night to have their head shaved onstage. One evening it was Chaillon.
She was struck by García’s use of food in performance; in La Historia de Ronald el Payaso de Mc Donalds, or The Story of Ronald the McDonald’s Clown, for example, hamburgers were fried onstage and performers were covered in ketchup as part of a wild allegory of globalisation.
“With food we can talk about class, about gender, about race, about everything. About the way food is packed, the way it is produced, about the animals who were alive before,” Chaillon says.
In the years that followed she made a series of utterly original creations in which she used her body to create striking visuals. (“As I can’t work with people, because I’m a bad director, I can use my own body,” she says. “The only thing I know I’m sure of is me.”)
Food became a motif; the theme reached its apotheosis with Monstres d’Amour, or Monsters of Love, a duet with the performer Elisa Monteil, who is white, that explored the dehumanisation of black people and historical associations with primitivism. Chaillon appeared as cannibal-like, eating food off Monteil’s body.
The play dovetailed with Chaillon’s growing awareness of the extent of racism in France. Around the time of Monstres d’Amour she agreed to be interviewed by the film-maker Amandine Gay for Ouvrir la Voix, an era-defining documentary about black women’s experiences in France. She became intrigued by Gay, and followed her on Facebook. One day she saw her post a link to a “camp for people leaving racism”.
Chaillon was blown away by the gathering; she went again the following year, this time with Déon. When Ouvrir la Voix came out, they decided to create a theatrical counterpart. What jumped to mind was the disproportionate number of black people working in menial jobs.
“Black women in theatre, I don’t see them. Maybe they are cleaning the toilets. If they want to see me talking about racism, the first image would be me cleaning the theatre,” Chaillon says. In Whitewashing, “I paint myself in white and use the same products to wash the floor to wash myself, to become black again.”
All the black women in the audience came onstage at the end to cry with us
The play is a duet that begins with her and Déon as janitors, then unfolds into an imagistic spectacle. Food, once again, is key: coffee – a colonial inheritance – drips from the ceiling, creating a ceaseless mess for them to clean.
An expanded version of this scene features in Carte Noire Nommée Désir, the name of which is full of associations. Chaillon had been offered “carte blanche” to use a theatre space however she wanted; “I am black,” she says. “I wanted a carte noire.” The name of the show also plays on an advertising slogan for the French coffee brand Carte Noire, not to mention evoking Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire.
It’s a surreal, lyrical work that playfully acknowledges racist histories; when black women arrive to watch the play, they’re guided to luxury seating; everyone else sits on fold-up chairs, as a kind of reversed version of segregation.
The reception was welcoming as the play toured for two years. It arrived in Avignon – “a white bourgeois festival”, according to Chaillon – amid nationwide protests following the police shooting of the teenager Nahel Merzouk. In an improvised scene during its run there, one of the performers remarked that the political left were silent about systemic racism; Chaillon and her colleagues were disturbed to see some in the audience raise their middle fingers.
Most serious was the response to a scene in which the cast play a game of charades in which they act out terms connected to racism. To help the audience guess the word “colonisation”, the actor Fatou Siby went into the auditorium to take bags and coats belonging to some of the audience. One man responded by twisting Siby’s arm. “Other people hit performers, called them dictators and implied they didn’t belong in France,” according to a New York Times account.
The cast weren’t the only ones horrified. “All the black women in the audience came onstage at the end to cry with us,” Chaillon says. “Like, 50 of them. Because they saw the racism in the room.”
After the hellish run at Avignon Festival, Siby and Déon were confronted on the city’s streets. A few days later, a production photograph of Chaillon carrying several white baby dolls, in a scene satirising the exploitation of black women as cheap childcare, circulated online; social-media users accused her of calling for a white genocide.
“We’ve stopped Carte Noire for now. We’re so exhausted. We’re going to take it again, maybe in two or three years,” Chaillon says.
In the meantime she and Déon are still performing Whitewashing; the play, having become a vignette within Carte Noire Nommée Désir, is having a life of its own again. “For Aurore and I it’s really beautiful that we keep this friendship,” Chaillon says. “It’s like keeping the heart of Carte Noire somewhere, beating.”
Whitewashing is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Thursday, September 25th, until Saturday, September 27th
