The total theater of Julien Gosselin

“Duras Museum” marks Julien Gosselin as director of the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe, a position he has held since July 2024, and which represents a generational and aesthetic change in one of the most influential theater institutions in France. His appointment, at only 37 years old, marks the desire of the Ministry of Culture to promote a more experimental line open to contemporary literature, stage hybridization and new languages.

Since his beginnings, Julien Gosselin has worked with literature not as a dramatic medium, but as a structure. His name started to stand out after the adaptation of “Elementary particles” in 2013, based on the novel by Michel Houellebecq. This production used cameras, projections, electronic music and a large cast to articulate a story. Already at that time, the director explained to the press that his objective was to “confront the contemporary text with current stage tools” and to avoid any illustrative adaptation.

This line was consolidated with ‘2666’ (2016)theatrical version of the novel by Roberto Bolaño. With a duration of more than ten hours and a fragmentary treatment of the original work, the montage has become a reference. Critics have highlighted the director’s ability to work with complex narrative materials without sacrificing stage intensity. In interviews from this period, Gosselin stated that the extension was not a provocative gesture, but rather the only way for the viewer to navigate a work of this magnitude: “Duration is part of the meaning”he then emphasized.

In 2020, he presented “The Past”, a project constructed from texts by Leonid Andreiev and other heterogeneous materials. There, the mix of theater, video, monologue, and documentary performance indicated an increasingly hybrid methodology. The director openly assumed that theater could function as a platform for organizing voices and eras without the need for a single narrative structure. This way of understanding the scene – as a space to reorganize literary materials, and not to translate them – became the conceptual basis of the “Duras Museum”.

The work, not a book

Unlike other productions, Musée Duras immediately renounces the idea of ​​adapting a specific work. The proposal was organized into eleven pieces or modules presented in a space reminiscent of a contemporary gallery: neutral lighting, passage areas and a division of time which allows viewing the entire project or by sections. The fragments come from different works by the author – stories, theater, screenplays, novels – and are activated by readings, projections, short scenes or physical interventions. The viewer does not follow a story, but rather a set of themes specific to Duras: desire, absence, waiting, childhood, memory or identity.

The format, explains Gosselin, responds to his desire to “allow each spectator to retrace their own reading of Duras”. She also justifies the presence of young performers, partly from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris, as a way of reintroducing the writer to generations who are no longer part of her original literary context. For him, confronting new actors with Duras’s writing is a way of guaranteeing that the author continues to circulate outside the academic circuit.

“Musée Duras” was read, according to critics, as an attempt to avoid the reverential presentation of the author. Instead of approaching his work from a heritage angle, the montage proposes to examine it by making visible the recurrences of his writing: voices that return, sentences that are repeated, calculated silences. Not all comments have been favorable; Some have pointed out that fragmentation is demanding on the viewer and that the length can make it difficult to hold the whole together. Overall, the proposal was seen as a further step in the director’s investigation into the boundaries between stage and literature.

Theater versus storytelling

Situated within the corpus of Gosselin’s work, the “Musée Duras” functions as an extension of previous methods. If in “Elementary Particles” and “2666”, literature provided a narrative framework, here this framework dissolved into a system of fragments. The director thus approaches theatrical trends visible in other European creators who work with literary texts in a non-narrative way: visual adaptations of novels by Flemish companies, hybrid devices mixing theater and live cinema, or even projects focused on reading as a stage gesture. In all cases, literature ceases to be a closed material and becomes a field of formal experimentation.

The closing of the meeting now leaves room for the evaluation of its scope. “Museum Duras” was not intended to replace the experience of reading Duras, nor to present a definitive vision of his work, but rather to propose an approach that would circulate his themes and style in a contemporary perspective. By organizing his writing as a journey, the piece invites us to reconsider the relationship between text and spectator. It was not about understanding an argument, but about observing how a literary voice functions when separated from its original structure. His previous montages already indicated this orientation; The Duras Museum consolidates it. Literature is not something that must be illustrated, but a system of tensions that can be organized in multiple ways on a stage. “Bring literature closer to the stage without fear of transforming it,” he defends. A theater which seeks above all to keep the dialogue open between the texts and those who receive them.