OUR STORY
It all began on a beach on Paxos in 1973 when a group of people from a small London-based theatre company on holiday together decided — against all reason — to pursue what we called “the Impossible Dream.” We would find a place where we could live together in community to devote ourselves to pushing the limits of human voice in performance and make of our lives our art. At summer’s end, in small parties of three and four, we made our way overland home to London, in search of that place. Deep in the Cévennes hills of southern France, Lucienne, Davide and Vivienne discovered Malérargues.
Less than a year later, over a period from July 1974 to March 1975, forty nine members of the Roy Hart Theatre moved from London to Malérargues and began the work of restoring the château and converting the old magnanerie — from Malérargues’ time as a silk factory — into our theatre.
We were actors and artists, photographers and plumbers, carpenters and cooks, sometimes all at once. We rehearsed day and night, we performed in village squares, picked apples, taught school children, dug trenches, built roofs and walls. Then on May 18th, 1975 the dream all but shattered when three of our company — Roy Hart, Dorothy Hart and Vivienne Young — died tragically in a car accident.
From that terrible hardship and endless nights of discussion was born our decision to persevere and to create the Roy Hart Theatre association, the association that still operates in Malérargues today as the Roy Hart Voice Centre.
Today, half a century later, the desire to pass on to new generations what we have received and built together is all the more important to us.
That is why, in 2021 we created the Malérargues Endowment Fund — to ensure the perpetuity of Malérargues the transmission of the cultural and artistic legacy of Alfred Wolfsohn, Roy Hart and the Roy Hart Theatre.
We want the work to continue.
WHAT WE WISH TO PROTECT AND TRANSMIT
Teaching the embodied human voice without boundaries — passing on a practice that has transformed the lives of thousands of students, performers and seekers from five continents who have found their way to Malérargues over fifty years.
Artistic creation in new approaches to living theatre, voice and art — supporting the next generation of artists who carry this tradition forward in their own voices, their own languages and their own times.
Conservation and stewardship of our archives: audiovisual recordings, posters, programmes, thousands of photographs, diaries, notebooks, correspondence, drawings, forgotten texts — the memory of a collective adventure and a continuously evolving story that belongs to the world.
Publications that document the evolving body of work — books, recordings, and research materials that nourish today's artists and tomorrow's researchers, ensuring the intellectual legacy of Wolfsohn, Hart and the Roy Hart Theatre is never lost.
And above all, the preservation of the place itself — these walls, these stones, these gardens — which we pulled out of ruin with our hands and which abides, for us, much more than buildings. Malérargues is the physical trace of our story and our legacy for future generations.
If you recognise yourself — even from afar — in this desire to transmit, to keep alive a certain idea of theatre as a human story, of the human voice without boundaries as expression of a more authentic way of being, know that you are welcome here.
The story is not finished.
With each generation a new chapter begins.
“To maintain Malérargues as a ‘field of action’ where art and life are together is our raison-d’être.”
