Comparative Drama

Originally published in French in 2014, Béatrice Picon-Vallin's encyclopedic book about the Théâtre du Soleil outlines the company's first fifty years. Picon-Vallin is the former director of the CNRS, France's center for research in the Performing Arts, and a professor at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris, France. This English translation by NYU Professor of French Theatre Judith G. Miller and her team was published in 2021. Containing 323 color illustrations and archival research, it provides a road map to Théâtre du Soleil's innovations, working methodologies, and willingness to continually reinvent itself, in response to current cultural questions. Picon-Vallin situates founder Ariane Mnouchkine at the center of this project but spends equal time reflecting on the company's diversity, originality, and creativity through interviews and images.

Picon-Vallin begins with a description of the company's origin story that hearkens back to ATEP (the Association for Parisian Theatre Students), Ariane Mnouchkine's first theatre group in 1959. After a year of preparation, ATEP's initial offering was a week-long run of the play Genghis Khan, based on the poet Henry Bauchau and performed in the Arènes de Lutèce in the Latin Quarter. Though biographical details of Mnouchkine's life are scarce, her father was a celebrated filmmaker, providing a foundation in both theatre and cinema that would influence her work and the ongoing artistic "adventure" of the company (2). Théâtre du Soleil's first shows established their cooperative policies and their physical, improvisatory working methods, which began with "concrete stage actions, rather than decoding the text" (11). Picon-Vallin details that early creative process, describing the company members' daily creative regime and use of the "text as inspiration" through a variety of exercises (12). Under Mnouchkine's strong ideological leadership the company developed its aesthetic early on, "a freedom from realism and psychological acting, freedom from the everyday, from naturalism" (33). Picon-Vallin describes their style as having the "spirit of the circus, of the fairground aesthetic," when they rejected the traditional Italianate proscenium theatre space and chose instead to rent a space in the Theatre d'Hiver (33). The introduction explains that the company understood that finding their own space was crucial to the type of work they hoped to produce. They eventually discovered an abandoned munitions factory called the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes, rented it from the city of Paris, and began its transformation to a theatrical space.

Picon-Vallin's book thoroughly details the process and working methods for each of the company's productions and the truly collaborative exploration that [End Page 438] led to each one's astonishing creativity. It was through Mnouchkine's persistent intellectual questioning and curiosity that "the company would inscribe itself … in a long and vast history of theatre, without ever copying, directly borrowing, or cleverly manipulating through deconstruction of hybridization the work of others" (49). As Picon-Vallin describes it, the creation and rehearsal process were intentionally slow, with productions like The Shakespeare Cycle, 1789, and The Golden Age sometimes opening weeks or months after their published start date. Mnouchkine and company were unapologetic in these moments as the work they engaged in required artistic courage, and painstaking detail and accuracy.

Chapter 2 includes a description of the ways in which each production required a complete transformation of the Cartoucherie. Mnouchkine remarked on that process in an interview with Picon-Vallin: "We transform the space for every show, but we never start from zero" (56). Images and detailed explanations reveal the ways in which the company's history is layered into the space itself: "we cut into the floor of the stage with a bulldozer and realized that underneath were layers of … other shows" (56). This depiction provides the reader with an imprint of the palimpsestuous nature of the...