"And then I will try to find another writer of his stature, if one exists."Perched on a bar stool around the corner from the chaos of the Drill Hall, a new festival venue with a few teething problems, Chereau, now 50, seems to have shed the imposing manner that terrified interviewers in the past. The only exception has been Roberto Zucco, a vicious nihilistic modern fable about an Italian serial killer, written in a frenzied rush of creativity while the author was succumbing to Aids "Some day I will do it," Chereau says. After seeing Chereau's production of Marivaux's La Dispute, Koltes bombarded the director with letters until a meeting was arranged Immediately, Chereau believed he had discovered a genius. "I will produce everything you write," he told him.And for 10 years, until Koltes's death from Aids in 1989, this promise was fulfilled: Combat de Negres et de Chiens (1983), Quai Ouest (1986), Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton (1987) and Le Retour au Desert (1988).
It was here that his collaboration and his close personal friendship withKoltes, now considered one of France's foremost contemporary dramatists, came to fruition. The resulting furore guaranteed Chereau a place in the pantheon of experimentalists. As artistic director in the Eighties of the Theatre des Amandiers in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, Chereau returned to the more serious task of building the modern French repertoire. But it was in the hallowed halls of Europe's opera houses that he made his most discordant impact with a run of controversial productions, culminating in the infamous Chereau/ Boulez Ring at Bayreuth in 1976, which terrorised hidebound audiences with visions from a 19th-century industrial nightmare. He began directing professionally at the age of 20, quickly acquiring the enfant terrible tag for dusky, sinuous, iconoclastic productions heavily influenced by both the Berliner Ensemble and Georgio Strehler's Piccolo Teatro. And every performance since has proved that I was right." Throughout his searing 31-year career, Chereau has always had an uncanny, unfailing eye for both quality and controversy. By the time Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton landed on Patrice Chereau's desk, it had already provoked a magnificent non-reaction in those who had leafed through its densely packed duologues and its dark, stylised stretches of inaction. The scenario conjured up by Bernard Marie Koltes in the piece just seemed too dramatically emaciated - an unspecified dealer meeting his client on a twilit street - to support its own philosophical weight.
Chereau recalls: "People who read this text for the first time said, 'It's interesting, but it's not so much a play as a statement.' And Koltes himself said to me that he felt it was perhaps not possible to put it on the stage. But when I read it, I knew that this was a beautifully theatrical text I knew that its complexity would captivate the audience. "But when it comes to a long life the encouraging news is that good guys finish last.". Termites who scored low on conscientiousness and whose parents divorced, died on average at 74, while the high scorers who came from an unbroken family survived to 81. Similar to the male-female difference."Common wisdom might suggest that a selfish self-indulgent boor may prosper by stepping on others," says Dr Friedman. "The fact that a combination of divorce and the conscientious personality is as accurate as gender in predicting longevity is dramatic evidence of the importance of these findings," says Dr Friedman.
