The French director Julien Gosselin says he doesn’t believe in making “normal” shows, and his literary adaptations have become notorious for their running times. One production that put him on the map was a marathon 11-hour adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel “2666,” in 2016. Two years later, he followed it up with a Don DeLillo trilogy that was projected to last eight hours — only to end up two hours longer.
“Is it outlandish? Obviously,” Gosselin said in a recent interview. “People can like it or not, but my job isn’t to please them.”
Now, Gosselin has a new audience: that of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, the renowned Paris playhouse he was appointed director of last year. The 2025-26 season is the first he has programmed, and he’s up against competing drives: the desire to stage big, visionary work and budgetary constraints that led his predecessor to quit.
“It is intimidating; I’d never directed a playhouse before, and it’s a big team,” Gosselin said of the 131 employees at the Odéon, one of six national theaters in France — a rarefied circle that also includes the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de la Colline. At 38, Gosselin is the youngest of its directors.
“I’m trying to be attentive to everyone — and at the same time not drown out my vision,” he said.
That vision includes a full slate of productions by buzzy European directors like Susanne Kennedy and Angélica Liddell, as well as revivals of two of Gosselin’s own productions this fall. “The Past,” which knits together excerpts from various works by the Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev, opened the Odéon season last month. And in November, “Duras Museum,” a production inspired by the French author Marguerite Duras, is a 10-hour show made up of five, two-hour parts.
“Duras” is a tall order for regular theatergoers, with performances starting at 10 a.m., even on weekdays. Yet his stamina-testing shows have generated significant excitement at high-profile events like the Avignon Festival, where regulars spend whole days at the theater, and many of the “Duras Museum” dates are already sold out.
That willingness to break with theater norms and history has long defined Gosselin’s career. Growing up in the city of Calais, in northern France, he never had “any appetite for heritage,” he said. His first taste of the Odéon was a class trip he took as a teenager to see “The Fan,” a classic 18th-century play by the Italian author Carlo Goldoni. What impression did it leave? “None,” he deadpanned. “I didn’t fantasize about grand theaters with a red curtain. I don’t even understand what attracts people to that.”
Yet other forms of performance did draw him. Calais is close to Belgium, where the Flemish avant-garde scene was at the peak of its popularity in the 2000s. The bold, interdisciplinary work of the artists Jan Fabre and Jan Lauwers and the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker made an impression that can still be felt in Gosselin’s own epic productions, which blur theater, cinema and performance art.
In high school, he would even skip class to help out at local venues. “I wanted to be there in the mornings, when the trucks were being unloaded and the air smelled of coffee and cigarettes, and also at night, when everyone was having drinks after the shows,” Gosselin said.
He found that sense of community at a newly opened drama school, the École du Nord, in the city of Lille. Still, Gosselin, who said he found being watched onstage “inhibiting,” knew early on that his future was in directing — and, together with other students, founded a collective to produce his first works.
Success came fast. After a couple of stagings made on a shoestring, Gosselin got an invitation from the Avignon Festival to direct a short work. “I said, ‘No, I’m going to do a full production, and you’re going to program me,’” he recalled. “I wanted to adapt a Houellebecq novel, and I knew it was the right moment.”
The event’s co-director Vincent Baudriller laughed, Gosselin said — then called him a few months later to greenlight the project.
Gosselin acknowledged that “being a man” helped: “If a woman had said the same thing at the time, she would have been seen as exaggerating.” The resulting production, a four-hour version of “Atomised,” a 1998 book by the provocative French author Michel Houellebecq, instantly put Gosselin on the map.
The sprawling works he has made since have been met with mixed reviews in France. Fans point to the literary complexity of productions like “The Past,” a four-and-a-half hour show that the French newspaper Libération declared “visionary” and “a maelstrom of images and sensations.”
Others have deplored the opaqueness of Gosselin’s unconventional approach to storytelling. He professes not to believe in fiction. “I have a real problem with the idea that theater is meant to achieve narrative fluidity, as if it could somehow resolve the world’s chaos,” he said. “It drives me crazy. A show, to me, has to be a mass of contradictory elements.”
He says he enjoys the contradiction of the Odéon itself — whose red-and-gold auditorium dates back to the early 19th century — as both a symbol of the theater establishment and a longstanding place of protest. It was occupied by workers and students during the revolutionary events of May 1968 and again by theater workers in the midst of the Covid pandemic.
“There’s a hidden violence inside these centuries-old stones,” Gosselin said. “I think anything can happen here.”
Still, his tenure comes at a delicate time for the institution. His predecessor, Stéphane Braunschweig, chose not to seek a third term because of the Odéon’s budgetary woes, which reflect a broader strain across French theater: In recent years, rising payroll and maintenance costs have collided with shrinking public subsidies.
“The Odéon is the second-most-subsidized theater in the country, yet the artistic budget had fallen dramatically when I left,” Braunschweig said in a phone interview. He said he felt lighter now that he is able to work solely with his own company. “It’s become harder and harder to manage playhouses. You really, really have to want it,” he added.
Gosselin managed to negotiate an injection of additional public money to the tune of around $590,000, due in 2026, but said the Odéon’s situation remained precarious. “A million” little efforts have had to be made, including an increased focus on private sponsorship. Gosselin also agreed not to direct a brand-new production until next season.
But over this season, which runs through June, he has pushed hard to deliver on the Odéon’s mission to be Paris’s “theater of Europe,” by inviting boundary-pushing artists — like the Spanish theater company El Conde de Torrefiel and the Finnish artist Samira Elagoz — who have made waves at major European festivals in recent years.
Just don’t expect conventional shows from him as a programmer either. “Sometimes artists come and tell me: ‘I want to do this thing, but it’s impossible,’” Gosselin said with a half smile. “Actually, to me, that’s a pretty good start.”
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