4th July, 2014
The two opening shows of France’s prestigious Avignon Festival — one of the world’s biggest theatre showcases — meant to be held Friday have been cancelled after strike action by actors and technicians.
The festival, which attracts 128,000 theatre-goers to the southern French city, has been under threat from a long-running dispute over planned government cutbacks to their status of “intermittents”: artists and cultural workers who are allowed to combine periods of work with paid unemployment.
Festival director Olivier Py told a press conference on Friday that the premieres of “The Prince of Hamburg” by Heinrich von Kleist and the ballet “Fatal Blow” would now not go ahead.
A similar dispute in 2003 forced the organisers to cancel a large swathe of the programme. The Avignon Festival is regarded as one of the biggest theatre festivals in the world, a title hotly disputed with the annual Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.