Interview with Léo Cohen-Paperman

Director of Animaux en Paradis and co-founder of Nouveau Théâtre Populaire

Léo Cohen-Paperman trained in directing at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique under Daniel Mesguich, Sandy Ouvrier, and Pierre Debauche. He is the director of the company Animaux en Paradis and a co-founder of the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire (NTP). His major productions include Othello (2018) and the first installments of his Eight Kings series: Vie et mort de J. Chirac, roi des Français (2020) and Génération Mitterrand (2021). As a core member of the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire, he has directed productions including Le Tartuffe (2021), Roméo et Juliette (2020), Illusions perdues (2018), and Hamlet (2014).

Is theater still alive outside of literate cultures like France and Russia, or do you find the quality is lacking elsewhere?

Léo: Well, it all depends on what we’re talking about. When I go to New York, I see immense artistic and theatrical vitality, but it simply isn’t the same tradition or history. In France, there is a great vitality of creation linked to the history of subsidized theater which actually goes back several centuries, notably to Louis XIV. One could almost say it was Louis XIV who invented subsidized theater with the troupes he supported.

So yes, there is great vitality linked to the fact that this sector has been helped by the State and public authorities, especially since the post-war period. However, one must be careful. What is questionable is that there are many shows that play very little. We have many subsidies for creating shows, but there isn’t necessarily a distribution schedule that follows for everyone. We help creation, but we don’t always ensure the work travels.

I don’t know other countries well enough to fully support a comparison, but what I see in France is a vitality linked to this history of state support. But this shouldn’t prevent us from seeing the bad sides, specifically real problems of diffusion. There are few shows that manage to exceed five performances. I think that’s one of the important subjects regarding how public theater is doing in France today.

Is theater in France shifting toward an exclusively older demographic, as it has in the US?

Léo: We have to be careful because I work all over France and there are many places, especially smaller cities, where there is a problem of audience renewal—where the audience is predominantly elderly. But that is a problem that isn’t unique to the theater; it is the problem of France because France has an aging population.

If we manage to bring young people back to the theater (and I mean theaters in general, not just the Comédie-Française) it is because there are partnerships made with the National Education system to take students to the theater. This fits into the tradition I was talking about: subsidized theater has multiplied partnerships with schools, which allows us to introduce young people to theater within the school framework.

Now, whether the people who went to the theater at school return afterwards of their own free will is a real question. But in any case, it is certain that everything is being done to make it happen.

Can you explain the difference between your two organizations: Nouveau Théâtre Populaire and Animaux en Paradis?

Léo: I founded my company, Animaux en Paradis, and I co-founded the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire (NTP) the same year in 2009. Indeed, they are two very different operations. In recent years, I have concentrated a lot on my company because I wanted to develop this theatrical series on the presidents of the Fifth Republic. Animaux is a structure that is more vertical; even if I work in co-writing, I have the direction and the “final cut,” so to speak. It is where I develop that specific artistic project.

The Nouveau Théâtre Populaire is a different story. It is very important to me because that’s where I was able to really train in theater, not having gone to major drama schools myself. I was able to direct shows at a very young age in front of large audiences and really experience what this job was. It is a collective in which I tend to direct texts from the repertoire including Molière, Shakespeare, etc.

The difference is also that touring is less important for the NTP than for my company. We are less constrained with NTP to make shows that fit within the market framework. We can make shows with lots of people on stage because touring is not the economic fundamental. On the other hand, we have much less rehearsal time for economic reasons.

But it is the same people. It is often the same actors and actresses that we find from one structure to the other—people I have known since I was 15 or 20 years old. We have developed a common grammar of work, and I like continuing to work with them because it allows us to go much further together.

I also think we complement each other. I am not an actor at all, while Julien is an actor to his fingertips. We don’t have the same relationship to the stage or to writing, and we don’t think the same politically. That is what is interesting: we are not clones, and we don’t agree on everything. That creates a sometimes interesting tension for the show.

You focus heavily on areas outside of Paris. Was that a strategic choice?

Léo: I was born in Paris, but when I was much younger, Paris terrified me. I had the impression that it was a place where one didn’t have the right to make mistakes. So I left for Reims because I was assistant director to a woman named Christine Berg who told me, “Come assist me, and I will help you mount your first productions in the Grand Est region.” I left also for personal reasons because it is easier to find housing outside of Paris.

At the same time, I started working in Fontaine-Guérin because we built the open-air stage for the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire in the garden of the grandmother of one of my comrades. It was really chance that took us there. Since then, that person passed away and the municipality decided to buy the place and entrust us with its management.

I had the conviction that I had to leave Paris to start working. But the choice of these specific territories was not really a pragmatic strategy at the start. Of course, afterwards I said to myself, “Ah, it’s easier to be spotted when you are a young director in the regions than in Paris.” But initially, it happened because I met people who took me to those places.

As Balzac said, “There are no principles, there are only circumstances.” The stories that shape our lives are the result of somewhat chaotic circumstances that we must then organize. I spent many years doing things that were perhaps more obscure—real labor with not much of an audience, in territories sometimes economically stricken. We became known nationally around 2021, but we had spent more than 10 years doing unrecognized work.

Would you consider filming your productions to reach an international audience, or do you believe theater must remain ephemeral?

Léo: Actually, all my shows are filmed already and broadcast on a platform called Opsis TV. I am currently working with production companies to build a collection of the complete set on the presidents to be broadcast on French television.

I think the idea is excellent. The work I do with the NTP around Molière or Balzac might interest international audiences more easily because those are known quantities. However, we played Chirac at Princeton University in the United States, and we are going to play Mitterrand there this fall. It interests some people because it is the History of France.

When I discovered foreign directors like Krzysztof Warlikowski or Thomas Ostermeier, I was fascinated because their work was so specific to their nations—Polish and German respectively. Warlikowski says, “Theater can only be national; it is a national dialogue.” But I find that doesn’t prevent it from interesting people outside. The problems the characters encounter in my Eight Kings series—disappointed political aspirations, resentments, fractures inside a society—exist in many Western countries. People could find a thematic resonance there, even if there is a network of references from which foreign spectators might feel excluded.

Can you walk us through the episodes of the “Eight Kings” series you have completed so far?

Léo: We have a very clear timeline for the series. We began in 2020 with The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French, which focuses on the relationship between the President and the “peripheral France” that felt betrayed by him. Then came Generation Mitterrand in 2021, which explores the disillusionment of the left through the eyes of three voters. We staged Dinner with the French by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 2023, portraying a bourgeois family receiving the President. Finally, for the Sarkozy and Hollande years, we experimented with form in a piece called Sarkhollande, created in 2025, notably with a sequence where Nicolas Sarkozy performs a stand-up comedy routine, addressing the audience directly on divisive identity issues.

The series has been well received: we have had 400 performances in five years for these first episodes, and it will be even more next season! The shows tour in all types of venues: municipal theaters, National Dramatic Centers (CDN), national stages, subsidized stages, and private theaters.

What is next in your “Eight Kings” series on the Presidents?

Léo: Next is The Therapy of Emmanuel Macron, planned for 2026. It is science fiction. The pitch is that we are in 2058, Macron is 83 years old, and he enters a psychoanalyst’s office to be dissuaded from running for a fifth presidential election. We imagined that Macron never really left the presidency for 50 years. We are creating this while he is still President, so we have to take a step to the side—into the future—to better analyze him.

Later, we will create the De Gaulle, which will be an opera, scheduled for 2028 or 2029. The pitch is that the real General de Gaulle enters the hall with the real audience in 1968. He attends an opera made in his glory that tells the story of 1940, 1944, 1958—the whole Gaullist legend. But this opera falls flat in 1968, and the performers revolt against what they are playing, creating a revolution in the theater that mirrors the May ‘68 student riots. On the ruins of that theater, the film of Pompidou takes place.

Our purpose with Julien, my co-writer, is not to do ideological theater. We try to consider these men of power in their humanity, in their trembling, to make them theater characters we can love or hate. If I stage Shakespeare’s Richard III, I want the audience to love him at some point, even though he is a bastard. We try to find the humanity in these men without “polishing their shoes” or being hagiographic. There is a quote by the infamous Charles Manson (it is strange to quote someone like him, I know) yet it fits the bill perfectly: “Look down at me you will see a fool, look up at me you will see a god, look straight at me you will see yourself.” We want to look at them straight on.

You use fictional “everyman” characters in these historical plays. What is their function?

Léo: We decided that in each show there has to be a character from the people, a fictional character who is our entry point toward the presidents. In Chirac, it is a young boy named Ludovic Muller who comes from peripheral France, the France of medium-sized cities which suffered from deindustrialization—what you might call the “Rust Belt.”

We believe we can only understand the presidents if we introduce them through the sensitive angle of someone like you and me. In Generation Mitterrand, we barely embody the President; it is really these fictional characters who are in the foreground. In Dinner with the French by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, it is the family that receives the president for dinner.

This allows us to tell the story not just of the president, but of the people who were betrayed or affected by him. For Mitterrand, we tell it from three different points of view: three characters from different social classes who voted together in 1981 but today vote for Macron, Mélenchon, or Le Pen. These characters allow us to embody the contradictory, violent relationships that exist inside society toward the presidential figure.

We mix testimonies and research to build them. For example, for the worker character in Mitterrand, we looked for testimonies of how a worker who voted for him viewed the mandate. But we always have to find a tension between the sociological reality and giving the character a soul so we believe in them. In life, we don’t always react in a coherent way regarding our social situation; sometimes we act in a more irrational, intimate way.

How does your philosophy differ from the didactic political theater of someone like Bertolt Brecht?

Léo: I discovered Howard Barker when I was 18, and I feel very close to his objective of trying to disturb people. What I like about Barker is that he doesn’t give the key to the audience. It is up to people to think on their own.

When I was in high school, I studied Edward Bond, and I hated it because I had the impression they were explaining to me what I had to think. I find it much more enjoyable to make theater that doesn’t take people for idiots. It is riskier.

I hate the exclusively militant character of some French theater where they explain the “correct” thought. As soon as that happens, I want to leave. Having characters who can be very conservative opposed to a character who is very progressive is marvelous if we, as authors, make the effort to understand both. It forces us to think against ourselves, which is why I find it so interesting to write.

How do audiences in rural towns react compared to those in Paris?

Léo: It is paradoxical because I really started working in those territories where it is less glamorous to do theater. This creates real differences on the political level. For example, in our show regarding Sarkozy and Hollande, it starts with a stand-up by Nicolas Sarkozy. He addresses the room on identity subjects which are divisive today. We observe important differences of reception depending on the territory.

One difference is whether we share the same codes. In metropolises, the code of stand-up is clear and accepted; in medium-sized cities, it is less so.

But there is also a form of activism for decentralization. We go to play in territories where there is less culture. The theaters buy our shows, which allows them to take risks because of the subsidized economy. But if we continue to go there, it is also because we propose shows whose themes interest people. People in difficult territories come because having shows about the presidents interests them—it is a common, universal history.

I think one of the problems of public theater was confining itself to subjects that were too militant. It is important to propose a public theater that is innovative but also popular. The money of public theater is not my money; it is the money of the French people. We must not lose sight of the responsibility to propose theater that is demanding but where we also seek to give people pleasure. Public theater has sometimes forgotten that a bit.

Stanley Kubrick famously had his Napoleon, a “white whale” project he never managed to film. Do you have a similar dream project?

Léo: After we finish with the Presidents, I want to tackle the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments—but to seize it as “profane material” for the stage. The goal is not to produce a literal or anecdotal interpretation, but to find the theatrical stakes within it.

There are so many fascinating questions to explore: Who is actually speaking in the Old Testament? Is it God? And if so, how do you play God on stage? How do we make the Gospels speak when they were written by witnesses? How do you represent the Flood, the resurrection of the dead, or the multiplication of the loaves?

I was reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom recently, and it deals exactly with this challenge of investigating the Gospels like a witness or a historian, focusing on the very start of Christianity. I am also very interested in the tradition of medieval mystery plays, which brought these stories to the public square.

I want to approach it with a spirit of joyful experimentation. It’s about taking this massive foundational text and seeing how we can construct theater from it, taking a “step to the side” to understand it anew. It’s a daunting challenge, but that is exactly why I want to do it.

Interviewer: You should give Mel Gibson a call to fund the project from the proceeds of The Passion of the Christ.

Léo: (Laughs) Sure, do you have his number?