LEVIATHAN

During the health crisis of 2020, we began a new working protocol with writer Guillaume Poix, conducting some 300 interviews in closed theaters with people from all walks of life. From these encounters, we identified “gaps” or “insufficiencies” in the social field. Far from taking a documentary approach, I then conceived a cycle of shows that would use the symbolic and performative means of fiction to attempt to “respond” to these gaps through so many theatrical acts. Leviathan, the third part of this cycle, premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2024, examines the workings of the justice system, its gaps and its alternatives.

Because it organizes relations between the members of a society, justice remains the keystone of the social and civic schema. Yet while everyone agrees on the idea of perfect justice, opinions differ as to its application. Justice is only as good as the way it is delivered. France, like other European countries, is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of confidence in this institution.

With this in mind, I set out to immerse myself in the Paris court system. Over a period of several weeks, with part of the team, I met a number of litigants, lawyers and magistrates. And I attended thirty days of immediate trials.
Immediate trials is a simplified and expeditious procedure - an average of twenty minutes - in which the presumed perpetrator of an offence is tried as soon as he or she leaves police custody.
This increasingly widespread procedure encourages incarceration, since 70% of sentences handed down are firm imprisonment.

Yet if the purpose of the right to punish is the maintenance of public order and the assurance of social peace, the question is whether modern criminal law, through an increasingly repressive policy, manages to accomplish its raison d’être. We need only look at prisons, both in terms of overcrowding and the social environment in which inmates live. Rehabilitation remains problematic, recidivism is high, and social peace is far from being achieved. We also observe that for the same offence, the risk of being placed in detention is multiplied by five if one is homeless. The risk of being sentenced to prison is multiplied by eight. Judicial repression does not affect the entire population in the same way. In most cases, punishment precedes the crime.

With immediate trials, the legal order does not function as an instance of integration and collective organization, but rather is part of political conflicts and reproduces power relations. I’ve observed that an accused person rarely faces his or her victim, but rather a prosecutor who sees society as the victim of the offence. So I ask the question: is it the penal code that makes the crime or the presence of a victim? Is it the penal code that demands justice, or the injury and its reparation? Why a repressive law rather than a restitutive law that would take responsibility for repairing the harm suffered?

I’m interested in transformative justice and penal abolitionism. These movements call into question the penal system as a whole (courts, police and prisons) and imagine alternatives. The aim is to create a genuine confrontation between the parties, to create the conditions for a genuine “political debate” within a courtroom, where the victim and the needs he or she may express are at the heart of considerations and decisions. The aim is to obtain answers so that he or she can understand the event he or she has suffered, have his or her injury recognized without charge, be reintegrated into a community that ensures his or her safety, obtain reparation for the harm she or he has suffered, and be able to transform the event to give it meaning. In this process, experts can intervene, but their presence must be minimal, never spokespersons.

LEVIATHAN presents itself as a counter-space in which I stage a critical investigation into our ways of seeing the organization and application of modern law and question our impulses to judge and repress.
The show features Guillaume Poix’s rewriting of real-time immediate trials. But as the proceedings unfold, they break down, leading to the possibility of a paradigm shift.

With eight virtuoso actors and an amateur actor in rehabilitation who acts as the guarantor of our story as well as its instigator, Leviathan attempts to turn certain obvious facts on their head and operate tipping points beyond good and evil, confronting us with the dilemma of violence, its legitimate exercise and its regulation by law. Ever since the biblical story, the same crucial question has been asked: who is the monster?

Lorraine de Sagazan, may 2024

Press reviews

Lorraine de Sagazan’s LEVIATHAN is a theatre of questioning, but she constantly weaves together reality and dreams, which come together in the most fantastic moment of the show. A horse, a real horse, in a dapple grey coat appears on stage, magnificent, an apparition synonymous with freedom, power and, perhaps, consolation (…) Between the grotesque and the beautiful, the director creates images of staggering power.

Fabienne Darge, Le Monde

In one instance, the permeation of real and carnivalesque, true and false, amateur and professional in Avignon reduced me to rubble. In “Léviathan,” a terrifying burlesque of the French court system directed by Lorraine de Sagazan, actors wearing plastic masks and moving like windup toys act out several swift “immediate” trials: legal procedures that are offered to those who are caught red-handed

Helen Shaw, The New Yorker

Sagazan’s impressive achievement with LEVIATHAN is that it is anything but documentary theatre, anything but the harsh realism that is more obvious when it comes to the courts. (…) LEVIATHAN is a work of striking and disturbing plastic beauty. (…) It is astonishing to be able to say just how excellent the actors are.

Sonya Faure, Libération

Broadcast on LEVIATHAN, with interviews with Lorraine de Sagazn and Victoria Quesnel

Arte Journal by Frédérique Cantu

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