Other Paris theaters may be a little envious of the Odéon this fall. In a stroke of good luck, long before the Nobel committee met to decide its 2024 honorees, the playhouse had scheduled a new stage adaptation of a work by Han Kang, the South Korean novelist and surprise winner of this year’s Prize in Literature.
Now, Parisians are flocking en masse to “La Vegetariana,” an Italian-language version of Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” directed by Daria Deflorian. The sold out run, through Nov. 16 at the Ateliers Berthier, the Odéon’s second stage, is a welcome opportunity to dive into Kang’s surreal style, by way of a thoughtful, if at times muted, production.
“La Vegetariana” is tightly focused on the novel’s central characters. Yeong-hye, whose sudden conversion to vegetarianism bewilders everyone around her, is watched closely by her nameless husband, sister and brother-in-law. In the novel, each of the three narrates a section. Here, too, they introduce Yeong-hye and comment on her directly to the audience in long monologues.
In that sense, Deflorian, who coadapted the novel with Francesca Marciano and also appears in the role of the sister, treats the source material with reverence. Onstage, Yeong-hye remains an enigmatic figure, speaking as little as she does on the page. Initially afraid of meat, she later stops eating altogether. She requires no food, she says at one point, because she believes she is morphing into a tree.
Unfortunately, without directorial intervention, an impenetrable heroine can also make for dull theater. As Yeong-hye, Monica Piseddu wanders the near-empty stage like a sleepwalker, dressed in an oversize T-shirt. While each scene is announced through projections with the abruptness of a movie script (“Couple’s House. Inside at Night.”), the shadowy lighting traps the characters in a kind of perpetual twilight, with gray walls as their cheerless background.
It’s a shame, because the cast brings a level of nuance to the characters that deserves more momentum. Piseddu conveys both unspoken tension and distance with Gabriele Portoghese, who plays Yeong-hye’s feckless husband. As the first narrator, Portoghese also strikes a welcome balance early on, drawing a few laughs even as he gets across his character’s flaws.
Deflorian still manages to find a handful of striking ways to translate key moments for the stage. In the first section, a mattress propped up against a wall serves as the marital bed. Instead of lying down, Piseddu and Portoghese lean against it, their relationship playing out in full view of the audience — from their growing estrangement to the husband’s eventual sexual assault of Yeong-hye.
Later, when Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an unsuccessful artist, offers to paint over her body, their encounter turns into the poetic highlight of “La Vegetariana.” Instead of actual body art, Deflorian’s direction positions Piseddu in front of an overhead projector. The brother-in-law then carefully paints on a transparent sheet, with the dots and lines projected in real time over Piseddu’s naked form.
It’s a startling image: the male character selfishly using Yeong-hye, yet also symbolically providing her with the transformed, nonhuman body she longs for. Deflorian’s love for the eerie, edgy situations Kang conjures in her prose shines through clearly here. “La Vegetariana” is her second production inspired by Kang’s books, after 2023’s “Elogio della vita a rovescio” (“Praise of Life in Reverse”).
This latest production — and Kang’s Nobel Prize — lands at an especially welcome time for the Odéon, which is in the middle of a difficult leadership transition. Last winter, Stéphane Braunschweig, who had been the playhouse’s director since 2016, declined to serve a third term in the role, explaining in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde that the Odéon was in serious financial trouble. The institution’s deficit rose to just above $2 million in 2023, and there would be no money for new work or co-productions for the current season, he said.
As a result, some programming had to be cut, including a production by the French director Lorraine de Sagazan that was postponed to 2025. Braunschweig’s farewell to the Odéon, his take on Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” is currently running on the theater’s other stage; his successor, Julien Gosselin, took over this summer.
Gosselin will likely be heartened by the popularity of “La Vegetariana,” which is co-presented by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, a multidisciplinary event with deep coffers. The core mission of the theater, whose full name is Odéon — Theatre de l’Europe, is to bring new productions from around the continent to Paris.
Braunschweig has done this faithfully, but it is a costly task, which requires the Odéon’s team to stay abreast of developments around Europe. Nobel Prize winners aren’t going to swoop in every day to help struggling playhouses, but Deflorian’s “La Vegetariana” which was developed in Italy and premiered there shortly before its Odéon run, reaffirms the value of literary adaptations — and of theater crossing borders.
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