A Spanish theatre producer has been sued for defamation after a French theatre critic read one of his reviews on stage, showing his bare bottom to the audience and calling him a “bastard”.
In a show that has sparked debate about the limits of artistic freedom in politically divided times, director and actress Angélica Liddell read a list of negative reviews of her past work from French critics, many of whom attended the opening show of the Avignon performing arts festival on Saturday.
In a 15-minute scene near the beginning of his play Dämon: El funeral de Bergman (The Exorcist: Bergman’s Funeral), Liddell stands with his back to the audience, naming critics and asking them to “face your own disgust.”
“I hate you and I loathe you,” the 67-year-old actress said at one point, lifting the back of her dress and looking out into the 1,000-seat hall of the Palais des Papes.
A special dose of poison was reserved for Stephane Capron, critic of the radio station France Inter. Liddell, who repeated his surname, copperA Spanish slang word meaning literally “male goat” but often used to mean “bastard” or “asshole”.
According to French media reports, Capron subsequently filed a libel complaint and asked the theatre to remove his name from future performances at the festival. This move was supported by the Syndicat de la Critique, the French theatre, music and dance critics’ union, which said Liddell’s show “undermined the moral integrity of our colleague”.
“We support freedom of the press, just as we support freedom of creation,” the union said in a statement. “In our country, critics are still free to write, to express a point of view. Artists too, within the limits of public insult.”
The Avignon festival responded to the criticism by saying it “defends freedom of expression and freedom of the press” but that its directors “have no right to interfere with the integrity of the works presented”.
“It is not possible to evaluate the comments made on stage as a stance of the festival within the scope of an artistic project.”
Liddell’s vitriolic criticism of his critics was not part of the play’s dress rehearsal and festival directors were not informed of it in advance, the spokesman said.
Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Liddell is known for his searing monologues against injustice, often directed and performed by himself. “I prefer to be an irresponsible artist,” he said in response to questions about the Avignon incident. “We must give the stage back to the mad, the irresponsible, those who do not understand what is appropriate.”
Although some critics have called Liddell’s work overdone, his relentlessly passionate performances have won him many admirers, especially in France.
“I was surprised that Liddell targeted the French critics in his play because they were so supportive of him,” said Laura Cappelle, who attended Saturday’s premiere as a critic for the New York Times.
The Avignon incident appears to be reminiscent of one in Germany last February, when the director of the Hanover State Opera ballet company smeared his face with dog faeces after a critic described one of his productions as “boring” and “disjointed”. But Liddell said his attack on his critic should be understood as part of his artistic performance.
Dämon consists largely of an imaginary dialogue between the Spanish artist and one of his artistic idols, Ingmar Bergman, and Liddell has said that this criticism of critics is above all a reference to the Swedish director’s famously combative relationship with his own critics.
In 1969, Bergman got into a physical fight with a theatre critic for the Dagens Nyheter newspaper over a negative review and was fined 5,000 kronor. “Bergman says in his diaries that it was worth paying 5,000 kronor,” Liddell said. “We don’t even know the critic’s name these days. Bergman is immortal.”
Liddell said he had not yet been served with a subpoena or injunction, but dismissed critics as lacking a sense of humour.
“The critic in question was offended by a pun and its synonyms, which is not even an insult in itself,” he said. “It’s a clownish, satirical act that takes advantage of the fact that Spanish is the guest language of the festival.”
Referring to the far-right’s advance in the first round of parliamentary elections last weekend, he added: “It is incredible that a French person feels that his moral integrity is being damaged when it is the moral integrity of France that is at stake because of his voters. When someone sues an artist, they are attacking art and culture out of sheer narcissism. Art is not the job of the police.”
Capron did not respond to a request for comment.
But even critics who declined to take legal action took issue with Liddell’s stance.
“Theater criticism is a very precarious and narrow profession these days,” said Fabienne Darge, a critic for Le Monde. She said one of the hand-picked critics was a freelance journalist, while another, Philippe Lançon, who was mentioned but not in the audience, was seriously injured in the terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015. “It’s not very elegant to attack the most vulnerable.”
Another critic mentioned in the play, Armelle Héliot of Le Figaro, wrote in a blog post that Liddell was not interested in the exchange of views, but was “only interested in himself”.
After the Avignon festival, Dämon: El funeral de Bergman will travel to Barcelona and then Madrid from July 19 to 21. El País speculated whether Liddell would direct his satire at Spanish critics for these performances.