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The massive grey church of Saint-Sulpice dominates a part of the left bank of Paris just behind the sumptuous Odéon theatre. It's around the corner from where Patrice Chéreau grew up in a family of artists – painters, I think he said they were. Now he lies in front of the sepulchre in his shiny black box, a muscular socialist under a mountain of Bourbon lilies.
As the owlish president of the republic looks on, a young priest clouds the air with rose incense. (Later, his friends object: "How absurd! Patrice was an atheist!") The grave pallbearers heave up the heavy box and lug their burden the long, long distance down the crowded nave towards the towering front door.
Suddenly someone in the shadows claps. My heart stops. At once the hundreds gathered start to applaud. It echoes, swells, deepens. As the vast doors are wheeled open, there's a roar from the crowd in the square.
We stand in the square in the rain, crying, greeting his friends and ours, smiling, holding hands with handsome old people we hardly know, rows of young faces glistening with tears, straight-backed, stoic, embracing each other, unable to say anything.
In 2004 the great Swiss director Luc Bondy directed a show for me at the Young Vic. His close friend Patrice Chéreau came to see it. Half-embarrassed, expecting refusal, I asked the obvious: "Why don't you do one, too?" Long pause. Very long pause. Charming smile. "Maybe."
Well, he didn't say no. For years I'd followed him around Europe, wherever he had a show – theatre, opera or his own solo performances. (A notable betrayal: in Paris for one night to see him perform his version of Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor, I discovered that Nina Simone – another genius – was at the Olympia. Simone won.)
One summer, I cornered him outside a cafe in Aix-en-Provence just before the premiere of his incredible production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead, later seen at La Scala and the Met. He was thoughtful but evasive. "Yes, I'm booked up but it could happen, possibly, I'm very busy, in a year or two. But we must think hard. What could the play be?"
A year later I was invited to Thessaloniki, where Patrice was to receive some grand European prize. That I had been asked meant something about our possible show – but what? I walked into the vast, domed civic hall on the seafront to discover I was on a panel of producers scheduled to discuss their experience of working with him. But that's ridiculous, I said. "Don't make a problem. Just give your impressions." But I've never worked with him! "How can that be? He particularly asked that you should speak."
Perhaps a hundred expensively dressed people looked up at the improvised stage. Sitting at one end of the group of producers, I pointed at the elderly theatre academic George Banu at the other end. "You must see this as a tableau. George represents what has been, I what will be. I've come from the future to tell you of a production Patrice has yet to do." A feeble joke, especially as I had no idea what the production would be or even, honestly, if there would be one.
Someone asked the inevitable: "But England has always ignored him. Tell us, why do you want so much to work with Patrice?"
So I told them.
In 1974, Peter Hall's National Theatre invited Chéreau's production of La Dispute by Marivaux to do a few performances in the newly opened Lyttleton. Chéreau had been a star director in France since leaving school. In his 20s, he had joined Roger Planchon as an associate at the famous Théâtre National Populaire outside Lyon.
What are the great productions I've seen at the NT? Planchon's Tartuffe, Peter Stein's The Hairy Ape, Giorgio Strehler's The Chioggian Quarrels, Bill Bryden's The Mysteries, Robert Lepage's Seven Streams of the River Ota, Stephen Daldry's An Inspector Calls, Katie Mitchell's Waves. It's a contradiction, but I remember all of them better than I remember La Dispute.
I was 22 when I saw it. I remember a vast box hedge, a pool of water, a large woman (Congolese, was she?) singing in a deep, rich mezzo, the intensity of the exceptionally handsome actors playing the children. I remember the long, long piece of music – was it Monteverdi? – that we heard before the show began. (Was it 20 minutes long?, I asked him 35 years later. "Seven and a half," was his lofty answer.) In terms of the detail of the show, I remember nothing more.
But what I will never forget was the air-thrilling realisation that I was seeing something that I hadn't imagined possible. I'd prepared by reading the play – but what was this? The play was there, but it was unlike any performance of any play I'd ever seen (and even at that age I'd seen plenty). It had an extraordinary freedom. It somehow suggested the complexity of everything, the contradictoriness. It would not be categorised. It was the truth as two people knew it – Marivaux and Chéreau – but the total truth, for that brief moment, anyway.
Who knew you could get that amount of life onto a stage? It was amazing. It was too bright, it burnt the retina, I could understand almost nothing, I can remember almost nothing. But, for me, it changed everything.
Ever since then, when the lights go up in a theatre and I see a sofa or a bench plumb in the centre of the stage, I want to go home. If you've put a sofa in the middle of the stage, where's the room for the vast box hedge? There's not enough open space for the Congolese lady to sing.
A taxi drew up outside the Young Vic and Patrice stumbled out. I tried not to stare at a scab across the bridge of his nose. "I am so stupid. I got drunk in my hotel room and fell onto the minibar." Uh-huh. Later I noticed one of his front teeth was loose. He took it out and waved it about, grinning. "I look like a tramp." He slotted it back into his face. What will you drink, Patrice? "A strong Bordeaux."
He had a way of drawing all the light towards him. Dressed in costly dark colours, he seemed to burn with an intensity that needed fuel of many kinds. He often seemed about to blow up – with anger, with hilarity, with incredulity, you didn't know. His assistant director at the Young Vic, Peter Cant, described him as: "Part bull, part toreador. For him directing is a blood sport." When he heard Patrice was to direct for me, a French festival director looked at me aghast: "But he will explode your theatre!" In a way he did.
We half-hid at my corner table.
"I have made up my mind." Great!
"I want to make Macbeth." Fantastic.
"Yes, but there is only one actor I can make it with." We'll get him.
"Yes, but he is very angry with me. I know he will refuse." We'll persuade him.
"You think it is OK for me to make Shakespeare as my English debut? Is my English good enough? You must tell me the truth." It's a great idea. You should do it.
"But how to do the ghosts? When I did Hamlet at Avignon, I thought: how to make the ghost extremely frightening? I had the idea for it to gallop in on a horse." My theatre's not quite big enough for that.
"But I've staged so many fights in my life, I'm sick of it. But I'll do it if you say so. I trust you." Oh Jesus, please don't trust me.
As predicted, the only possible actor was angry with him. So we met others, and soon Patrice had found the only actor who could possibly be better than the first.
After one such casting session, he set off back to Paris. He called me from the Eurostar. "You know I am doing a play by Jon Fosse?" Yes, it was to be performed in a gallery of the Louvre and then all over France. "His agent has sent me another one. It's crazy, they always do that. But I like this new one better than the one I agreed to. You know, it's ridiculous for me to make my English debut with Shakespeare. Read this Fosse. Say what you think, but if you like it I will make it for you."
In Europe, Jon Fosse is the most performed living playwright. His subject, time after time, is "the dark", the bitter and hard-won survival over despair, the self-destroying side of life we can't explain or avoid.
I glanced at I Am the Wind but put off reading it for days. I eventually got to it sprawled on a pavement in the sun in Tel Aviv.
Two men meet. They decide to get into a boat and row out to sea. One drowns himself. ("I am the wind," he says.) The other drowns in grief.
For many years, I suffered badly from depression. I know a bit about it. I know only one genius play on the subject, Endgame by Samuel Beckett. Was this another? I liked it very much but it seemed slight, the pages so empty, almost white.
Jack Laskey in Patrice Chéreau's production of I Am the Wind at the Young Vic in 2011. Photograph: Simon Annand
Would I have said: "OK, let's go" to any other director? Unlikely. Who in London will want to see this play? London theatre doesn't really know Fosse, but what it knows it loathes. But that singing Congolese lady, that box hedge.
"Ok, let's go."
I took him to see Room 7 at the Jerwood rehearsal studios, one of the best rehearsal rooms in London – high ceiling, flooded with light. On the way out, I lost him then found him contemplating a little fountain by the entrance: very low down, a rectangular block of thin stone with water gurgling around it. In Richard Peduzzi's design, this became the "boat" on which the two men set out to sea: a simple rectangular platform. Operated by a special metal arm cunningly manufactured in Italy, it rose up out of the big pool of water that had gushed into and filled the otherwise empty Young Vic stage.
The moment when this "boat" first appeared was exquisite conjuring, unlike anything else I've ever seen. There's nothing on stage except a few inches of water covering a big seaweed coloured canvas. And then - whoosh - up it came, parting the waters, and the two men were out there in middle of the ocean riding the waves.
Perfect. Poetic. Existential. But also just a piece of wood steered by one man somehow sailing another over a darkened stage.
Sometimes, of course, the cunning Italian metal arm malfunctioned. On press night, I stood at the side of the stage and prayed to all the gods in whom I don't believe. Long afterwards, a critic who had loved it told me that, as they took their seats, a number of his colleagues had chortled in anticipation of an evening of tedious pretentiousness. Many of them were bemused. Even bored. Even some of my friends didn't get it.
Jon Fosse himself had seen a late rehearsal. He arrived early in a good state, but by the time the run began he had had a few drinks. (His agent explained: "He gets so nervous.") Somehow by the end he'd sobered up. He padded across the vast, still damp acre of canvas into the tromp l'oeil far distant horizon and put all three of his arms round the actors (Tom Brooke, Jack Laskey) and Patrice. 'You have made it a love story. I adore it. It's great, it's great."
It was great. I have no doubt of that. We'd judged the number of performances well, and it more or less sold out. Many, many people said to me: "That's the best production I've ever seen in my life." Or "one of the best" – let's not go crazy.
Or, yes, let's go crazy. I remember the man who operated the many delicately timed subtitles when it played in Barcelona collapsing with exhaustion at the end of a performance, flat out on the floor, panting "I got it right! I had to! I love it so much." I remember a performance at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris when, as the show ended, a man in the audience stood up and started shouting. Oh my God, I thought, is he booing? What's going on? It wasn't until the applause at last died down that we could hear the words he was howling across the emptying auditorium: "Merci! Merci! Merci! Merci!"
Before he started rehearsals, Patrice told me he had prostate cancer. "I have to tell you because you are my boss. Don't worry, I won't let you down, it will be fine. I have to return to Paris every weekend for treatment. But it's OK, I can do it. Please don't tell anyone." His soul-warming smile.
It was often obvious that he was in deep pain. The actors and his longtime choreographer Thierry Niang knew everything. Was he going to die? No. Was this a play about a man dying? Pause. Very long pause.
Once, sitting outside the theatre, he suddenly went dead white, staggered, half-fainted, hauled himself up, recovered, sat still for a while, went back into rehearsal.
I used to fetch him from St Pancras whenever he returned from Paris and the chemical onslaught. As I drove him to his hotel, he'd sit in ghastly silence, clutching his translations of Conrad's Lord Jim and The Mirror of the Sea, which were part of his research. One day as he arrived on the station concourse he told me at once that the cancer had got worse. It had spread to his liver.
In June this year, I emailed him and didn't hear back. In August an answer came: "Hi David! I didn't answer you because my summer has been quite strange and very agitated. I am sorry. I worked very well at Electra in Aix. The production was good, I guess. Then I went to Spain and suddenly, with the heat, I discovered how exhausted I was. Now I am in hospital recovering from strong anaemia, dehydration etc. Nothing very important. The illness seems to be stopped, under control. I hope to leave this place at the end of the week and have some days of holiday finally. Lots of love, p."
(Always, with Patrice, the small p.)
In October I was in New York. My iPhone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text message from Katie Mitchell. "I've just heard some sad news and wanted to check you knew ..."
From the rainswept square of Saint-Sulpice, we took taxis to the Père Lachaise cemetery. Drenched, we dawdled, stopped off for soup then got stuck in traffic. By the time we arrived the coffin had already been cemented in. A workman with a bucket was clearing his tools away. It was still raining, though lightly now. Thierry Niang looked at us, eyes full of tears: "Now Patrice is the wind."
I thought of all those sofas still cluttering all those London stages all those years later ... and I thought "Who cares?" I had the sun king in my theatre as he blazed up one last time. I wouldn't mind having that on my own tombstone.
• This is a version of the speech David Lan will give on Sunday 15 December at the Young Vic at a celebration of the life and work of Patrice Chéreau, in collaboration with the Royal Opera House and the Institut Français. Click here to book tickets or for more information
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