ANYTHING GOES AT AVIGNON FEST

AVIGNON, France —  The Avignon drama festival is hardly like the fiesta in Pamplona, but if someone ran bulls through the streets of Avignon, it would not surprise the thousands of playgoers who cram the antique papal city every year. They would simply wonder what play had brought on so much ballyhoo.

The 40-year-old Avignon festival, which closed its annual five-week season Thursday, is the oldest and probably the most prestigious of Europe’s large drama festivals. Its official productions play in magnificent and hallowed settings like the Great Court of Honor of the Palace of the Popes and the cloisters of the old monasteries and convents in and around the city.

But there is nothing staid about the festival atmosphere. Despite its prestige, Avignon does not resemble the Shakespeare festivals of North America in any way. It is less a veneration of theater than a celebration and whooping up of it.

Much of this atmosphere comes from what the French call the “off” at the festival--a myriad of small, uninvited companies that produced 300 shows in 50 theaters during the five weeks of the festival this year. Some of these theaters are minuscule, fashioned from restaurants, garages and stores.

To compete for attention, these companies send African and Jamaican drummers, Dixieland jazz bands, top-hatted maitre d’s, rickshaw drivers, balloon carriers, belly and stilt dancers, sandwich men and mimes into the streets of Avignon. Hucksters scatter leaflets on the tables of outdoor diners in the Square of the Clock alongside the City Hall. Young people plaster posters on the walls of the old buildings on every narrow street.

Jewelry-hawking craftsmen, poem-selling poets, Peruvian singers, English guitarists, caricaturists, clowns and beggars also try to catch the eyes and pocketbooks of the festivalgoers.

A Swiss musician played his own compositions in the square this year on a piano still in the cart that he had pulled by bicycle from his home in Berne 300 miles away.

The festival evokes feverish praise from French theater lovers.

Jacques Julliard, editor of the French news magazine Nouvel Observateur, wrote that the official festival’s world-premiere production of the full 10 hours of Paul Claudel’s 60-year-old play “The Satin Slipper” this season “restored to theater, poetry and, in fact, French literature just what it now needs--an incredible and unique work, a torrent of images and words.” A critic for Le Monde called it “a summit of theater, of poetry, an enchantment.”

This kind of praise is a powerful stimulant. Talking with reporters on the last weekend, Alain Crombeque, the festival’s 47-year-old director, said: “The Avignon festival is a place of magic. It has been carried for 40 years by a fervent public that is still with us. There is no crisis in Avignon, and there is no crisis in the theater in France.”

The first festival, advertised as “A Week of Art in Avignon,” opened Sept. 4, 1947, with the actor Jean Vilar directing and starring in a French translation of Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” There were only three plays that year. Vilar, whose mark on Avignon is still obvious, ran the festival for 24 years until his death in 1971.

Avignon’s architectural magnificence comes out of the 14th Century when the popes, under pressure of the French kings, moved the seat of the papacy from Rome to this city on the Rhone river.

Vilar chose the Court of Honor of the Palace of the Popes as the stage for his “Richard II,” and this enormous open-air courtyard has served since as the setting for the festival’s most important productions. The stage is so large that it seems to cry out for lavish production, and this poses problems.

“The Court of Honor is the symbolic setting of this festival,” said Crombeque, the head of the festival. “It may be a difficult place for a director, but there is no question of abandoning it.”

Moreover, weather can be a factor in open-air shows. Summers are usually warm and dry in this part of southern France, but gusts of wind swept sheet music away from the orchestra one night this season while it was trying to accompany a ballet by the Opera of Paris. Rain forced cancellation of “The Satin Slipper” in the Court of Honor and all other outdoor performances on July 15, even though President Francois Mitterrand had arrived to attend a performance of a Harold Pinter play in the nearby cloister of the Carmelite Convent.

Avignon ensured a secure place for itself in French theatrical history in 1951, when Gerard Philipe, France’s best-known postwar movie star, persuaded Vilar to let him join the company. Philipe’s performance in the title role of Pierre Corneille’s classic “Le Cid” at Avignon that year is still regarded by many as a magical moment in French theater. Philipe acted at Avignon until his death in 1959 at the age of 37. He was buried in the costume of Le Cid.

Avignon had a somewhat troubled year in 1968, the era of the student uprisings throughout France and the rest of Europe. Many French thought Vilar had blundered by inviting Julian Beck’s Living Theater to Avignon. They feared that Beck’s avant-garde American performers would infect Avignon with hippie culture.

But the actors of the Living Theater were too busy to go around infecting anyone with anything but their art. Some demonstrations did erupt over a foolish decision by the powerful prefect to ban a play as pornographic. But the directors of the Avignon festival faced fewer rebellious young people than most French institutions that year.

Yet Avignon was not left unscathed. Many analysts attribute the proliferation of “off” theater groups around the festival in large part to the iconoclastic mood of the young in 1968 who wanted to balance the “official” culture of French institutions with culture of their own.

Although the “off” infuses the festival with frenzy, color and enthusiasm, the French tend to test the state of their theater by the festival’s official productions. Avignon produced 55 works, including ballet, in its five weeks this year, making it, in the words of Crombeque, “the biggest theatrical enterprise in France.”

Important companies and directors often perform new works in Avignon before presenting them in Paris. In the last few years, for example, the festival excited critics by introducing some of the best work of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Paris-based Theatre du Soleil and by offering Peter Brook’s production of “Le Mahabharata” in 1986.

This year Avignon drew the most attention and rave notices for the first full-length production of “The Satin Slipper.” Claudel, the Catholic lyric poet who died in 1955, completed the play in 1928 but did not see it produced until Jean-Louis Barrault presented a shortened version of the play at the Comedie Francaise in 1943. The new full-length version, directed by Antoine Vitez, opens in Paris in the fall.

The latest season also offered a kind of reintroduction to the little-known plays of Robert Pinget, a 68-year-old novelist associated with the nouveau roman school of authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon, intent on breaking down the usual forms of the novel. Many readers find the novels obscure and hard to follow, but Pinget’s plays were successful, vibrant and funny enough at Avignon to ensure them an audience when they’re revived in Paris.