Théâtre de l’incendie – Laurent Fréchuret

Theater Company based in Saint-Etienne (France).  Advising and supporting international activities.

 

 

Laurent Fréchuret founded his theater company Le Théâtre de l’Incendie in 1994, based on a project to stage poetry and human voices.  He directed plays by Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Copi, Cioran, Dario Fo, Valletti, Burroughs, Bond, Pasolini, Bernard Noël, Cocteau, Artaud, Genet…  An unrepentant reader, he likes writers who invent words, worlds, and actors who will likely play with stories.

In 2000, he is awarded the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs Prize, and thanks to a French Institute grant, he travelled to New York and Tangiers to conduct research on American writer William Burroughs.  He then adapted a play based on Burroughs’ 24 books, Interzone, presented in Paris and on tour.

In 2004, he was appointed Artistic Director of the National Drama Centre in Sartrouville, in the Paris suburbs.  Until 2012, he invented and shared with invited artists and local inhabitants, a genuine and vibrant theater, with many productions from classics to contemporary texts. He worked with a permanent group of actors alongside the building of a new theater space.  In 2008, his first published text Sainte dans l’Incendie, was awarded the Lyon Playwriters’ Prize.

In 2013, with his Theater Company, he staged Shakespeare’s Richard III, followed by Becket’s Waiting for Godot.  He initiated a new cycle of contemporary playwriters’production including Blandine Costaz, Werner Schwab, Michel Tremblay and Hervé Blutsch who’s text Ervart, or the last days of Frederic Nietzsche was presented in Paris (Théâtre du Rond Point) and on tour in France.