The Avignon 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 intermittent artists and cultural workers who are allowed to combine periods of work with paid unemployment.
Festival director Olivier Py called 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.