Contemporary European Theatre Directors

Maria M. Delgado, Dan Rebellato, Maria M. Delgado, Dan Rebellato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429682193
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years.

This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape.

Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

Chapter 1

Ariane Mnouchkine

Activism, formalism, cosmopolitanism

Brian Singleton

Most twentieth-century European theatre directors have been indissociable from the theatre companies they have founded; no closer relationship between director and company can be found than that between Ariane Mnouchkine (b. 1939) and the Théâtre du Soleil. This symbiosis is, in part, the result of the funding mechanism for theatre companies by the French state that subsidises the individual director rather than the company as an entity. But in Mnouchkine’s case this symbiosis is furthered by several important factors including the theatre space the company occupies, the nature of the company as a collective, and the direct political action in which Mnouchkine, under the umbrella of her company, has been engaged. Mnouchkine’s career has always been associated with her company. She has not directed outside its aegis, and the national and international accolades her productions have garnered have placed the Théâtre du Soleil at the very forefront of international theatre practice in the past 55 years.

Mnouchkine’s practice has been engaged with the political from its earliest days and humble beginnings; she has exposed the myths and ironies of France’s post-Revolution democracy, indicted the social inequities of contemporary European society in terms of race, class, and gender, and latterly has examined the trauma and suffering of those caught up in the global human movement of conflict migration. As her practice has evolved, so, too, has her company over four decades; the original, a group of student friends, has been replaced with a vast cross-section of performers from all over the world who have brought with them their indigenous performing traditions. And so, with an internationalised practice in terms of form and the subjects of representation, and her personnel increasingly transnational subjects, the global brand of the Soleil has attracted large-scale funding for the supranational festival touring circuit. Further, her direct political action in the student protests of 1968, 40 years later, has shifted to the contestation of tyranny and injustice on a global scale. Ariane Mnouchkine now is no longer simply a European director; she is a theatrical activist on the world stage.

Beginnings

Travels in the Far East after her student days (where she encountered the traditional theatre forms that were to inspire her for most of her career), as well as some embryonic attempts at directing while at Oxford University and most significantly at the Sorbonne, Université de Paris III, fostered a desire to pursue a career in theatre. Without ever subscribing to a particular political ideology, Mnouchkine, growing up in occupied and post-war France in the shadow of the Algerian War, and under the influence of major existentialist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, has always been ‘de gauche’. Sartre was invited to be the patron of her student company l’ATEP (L’Association Théâtrale des Étudiants de Paris) that later formed the embryonic template for her professional company in 1964. When that company was formed by ten student friends it was called a SCOOP (Société Coopérative Ouvrière de Production) – a workers’ cooperative in which the original ten members invested equivalent sums and shared equal status in the running of the company, without an internal hierarchy. But its title, ‘Theatre of the Sun’, was Mnouchkine’s homage to the treatment of light in contemporary cinema.

Unlike other profit-share theatre-company directors that had driven the historical avant-garde before her, Mnouchkine neither sought investors nor solicited subscribers for her enterprise. However, she did not rely solely and idealistically on the work to be the attraction in itself. Instead, she was actively engaged with the trade-union movement in the early days of the company, offering workshops and special concessionary tickets for union members, in an attempt to completely change the demographic of her audience. Her aim was to create a ‘people’s theatre’ (see Bradby and McCormick 1978), and she had many antecedents within the historical avant-garde since the turn of the last century, through to the post-war projects of Jean Vilar (and his Théâtre National Populaire project) as well as Roger Planchon at Villeurbanne (Lyon). Her other source of inspiration was Jacques Copeau, whose work at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier from 1913 to 1924 aimed to strip the theatre of its commercial excesses and its attachment to realism. Copeau’s subsequent company (known as Les Copiaus) served Mnouchkine as a model in terms of its being both a theatre and a school. The members of both companies needed to sign up to the principles of a cooperative working and social existence. Thus, Mnouchkine’s place within the history of French theatre is determined as much by her political views as regards the nature and conditions for the production of art as by the quality and the representation of the world in the art itself.

It is impossible to chart the emergence of a directing style for Mnouchkine without acknowledging the influence of her company on it. But it is that very notion of the collective that was the cornerstone of her company that we must first look at in order to understand better how Mnouchkine’s directing practice emerged and how it impacts on her theatrical creation. In the early days of the company, like many companies before the Théâtre du Soleil, the actors only met in the evening after long and arduous days working in menial jobs to earn a living. They would come together at night in order both to train and to rehearse. Mnouchkine was the exception in that she enrolled at the École Jacques Lecoq, training in corporeal mime and then, in the evenings, she would pass on the knowledge and skills learned during the day to her fellow company members. Of course, a hierarchy swiftly developed within the creative process, but this was as much out of expediency – as well as Mnouchkine’s own wish not to be an actor – as from any other motivating factor. But that early training clearly set up from the outset an acting style as well as a directing practice. Lecoq training (see McBurney 2002) very much centres around the improvised creativity and corporeal awareness of the actor. It evokes in the actor a colourful imagination and builds up an idea of character as a mask that weaves a path through various ‘states’ starting from the neutral mask. What role then does the director have in such an actor-centred creative process?

In order to answer this question, it is important to establish the differing traditions of the concept of director that emerged with the historical avant-garde at the turn of the last century. The English word for the job was a development of the actor-manager idea of a corporate boss with an artistic vision. In French, the metteur en scène implies a functionality for the role in a predominantly author-centred theatre. But it is the German word, Probenleiter, that Mnouchkine herself chose to adopt in the 1960s to describe her function, with its sense of someone leading rehearsals. Given the embryonic Lecoq acting method that was emerging, Mnouchkine’s self-fashioned role moved away from ‘staging’ to stimulating actors’ creativity along the lines of various masked traditions, including Lecoq as well as commedia dell’arte. Very swiftly, Mnouchkine moved away from the psychological meaning of the text and its subtexts to a highly presentational style that evolved eclectically over the next five decades as it encountered various masked and other corporeal performance traditions from all over the world.

Collective creation: activism

It is within this semi-egalitarian business structure and improvised working methodology that emerged a theatre practice that was to be emulated throughout the world: création collective. ‘Devising’, in English, is an inappropriate translation of the idea in the sense that it does not take account fully of the political motivations that underpinned Mnouchkine’s company work. The term used by David Williams, ‘collaborative’, is a much more accurate term for the process (Williams 1999). After much success with a production of Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen (under the title of La Cuisine) in 1967, in which improvised scenes of manic kitchen activity brought accolades, and a highly sensual version of Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in 1968, inspired by Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967), Mnouchkine turned her attention exclusively for the next ten years to productions that were created collectively. It would be wrong to state that the political events of the student protests and workers’ strikes of May 1968 were solely responsible for this new development in the company’s practice as the working method had already been established in the two previous productions, and Wesker’s exposure of the conditions of labour clearly fitted in with the working method of improvisation in the political sense. Nevertheless, the idealism that accompanied the protests and strikes and Mnouchkine’s direct involvement with the uprising, and her cultural contribution to it in the form of presentations, workshops, and debates with the striking workers, was a motivating factor for future work. It was also the source of complete disillusion since the whole protest was a failure. Coming to terms with that failure, Mnouchkine also had to come to terms with the fact that her earlier idealistic view that theatre could change society if not the world was a pipe dream. Theatre may not be able to change anything directly, Mnouchkine quickly discovered, given its elitist bourgeois form, its place in wider social practices, and its very narrow demographic attraction, but it still retained for her an agency in germinating and nurturing political consciousness.

This led to a complete rethink of her theatre’s future. She dispensed with classical texts for the next decade and concentrated solely on collective creation that examined major political events and revolutions in France’s history as well as the contemporary conditions of existence of the people who are never the subjects of historical representation. The focus thus for the collective was a desire to construct an alternative performative narratology that stood in opposition to the grand and hegemonic narratives of national history and to focus instead on the hidden histories that collectively make up much broader social struggles. Instead of ‘being’ characters from history, Mnouchkine’s actors would self-consciously present them. Instead of keeping their audiences in the dark they would keep them active and offer them agency. Instead of waiting for the audiences to come to them they would go out and bus them into the theatre. And, most importantly of all, they would abandon theatre buildings for ever and perform in their new home, a disused ammunitions factory (Cartoucherie) in the middle of the Vincennes forest, far away from the bourgeois comforts of the boulevard theatres (see Cramesnil 2005). Acknowledging that theatre in itself could not change anything socially or politically, Mnouchkine was offering the possibility through the experience of a demystification of the art form of theatre, that spectators might emerge into social and political realities with a renewed desire for change and a new idealism that had been shattered by the events of May 1968.

From the late 1960s and through most of the 1970s, the Théâtre du Soleil produced four devised plays, Les Clowns (The Clowns, 1969), 1789 (1970), 1793 (1972), and L’Age d’Or: première ébauche (The Golden Age: First Draft, 1975). The first and last of these were productions in clowning and commedia forms that dealt with the conditions of contemporary life in France with an emphasis on the pursuit of happiness and escape for the marginalised in society (women and migrant workers). The middle two plays are now celebrated by historians for their theatrically innovative retelling of the story of the French Revolution. Mnouchkine now resists discussing these productions or even watching the film she herself made of 1789, calling the style ‘simplistic’ and evoking certain ‘interpretative imperfections’ (Mnouchkine 2005: 130). Her retrospective unease with the work of that period is as much concerned with the form of the acting as it is with the dramaturgical choices made and the political naivety of her intentions.

A multi-focused spectacle, 1789 took place on and around five raised stages. Spectators had the option to either sit on a riser or to wander around the Cartoucherie choosing their viewpoint and, more often than not, bumping into the actors either in a scene or preparing for one. This element of choice given to the spectators was a deliberate simulation of a democratic ideal that was encouraged to be taken out of the auditorium after the production. Its aim also was to show more of a process, of how theatre was created as well as how histories are constructed, rather than a finished production. Although now a film version is extant, as is a script, the production evolved over a two-year period, and, as in all true popular theatre forms, the production differed night by night.

To prepare for the production, all of the company members immersed themselves in the political and social histories of the period, in various filmic representations, and, most notably, in collections of cartoons. The actors were divided into five groups, hence the ultimate five stages in the performance, and they all followed Mnouchkine’s direction that they should represent fairground workers and entertainers of the period, telling their stories of the grand narrative of the Revolution from their own political perspective. And this is how the collective creation evolved, from a consensus on the subject matter, to a direction as to the form, and in a space that was to represent a sporting arena, which was a deliberate simulation of a reception area of an alternative form of popular culture. Given the heavy emphasis on visual representations of the Revolution, and particularly the lampooning of the central figures from press cuttings, as well as the choice of fairground workers as first-level characters, it is not surprising that the entire production was a series of parodies of seminal and iconic moments from the histories of the Revolution. Actors were able to explore and master various skills of popular entertainment ancillary to theatre, such as juggling, flute playing, acrobatics, and puppetry. The result was a cacophony of often simultaneous action that broke down the barriers between the watchers and the watched and exposed very clearly history as narratology, or ‘the very difficulty of reconstructing history at all’ (Bradby and Sparks 1997: 23).

The first part of the production was made up of a collection of improvised scenes, right up to the popular uprising that culminated in the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris. They were all designed to demonstrate the plight of the peasant classes in the face of an ignorant and carefree aristocracy. Illiteracy, poverty, and physical suffering were primary social ills on display, and the binaries of rich and poor were exacerbated by a haunting and romantic soundtrack. In the storming-of-the-Bastille scene, actors took up positions all over the playing area and gathered neighbouring spectators around them in order to tell them their own version of the time when the prison was taken. In this 30-minute improvisation, the actors began with a whisper and ended with a triumphant shout of victory. Spectators were free to wander from one actor to another and had the possibility of building up a collective version of the events of that day. As the actors were telling the stories from their own political positions, spectators were in the enviable position of listening to alternative histories and also of making choices in whose interpretation to believe. This was a clear exposure of how meaning is constructed by the producers of theatre and how it is open to multiple interpretations by spectators. Further, the dismantling of a singular theatrical narrative clearly could be read against the totalitarian regime from which France had been liberated in 1945. The celebratory fairground scene that followed, and bled into the interval, was also a staged moment of idealistic celebration that captured the spirit of the students during their street protests in 1968. But just as the student revolution turned out to be a disappointment, the production resumed after the celebratory interlude with actors on patrol with guns and a very large banner with the word ‘ORDRE’ written on it that passed through the arena pushing the spectators aside and into ‘obéisance’. Here came the bourgeoisie, the true victors of the Revolution, accompanied by the National Guard to fill the power vacuum and still leave the marginalised, disenfranchised and evicted from the stage space. And, like the Brecht-inspired sequel, 1793, two years later, the remainder of the work evoked the failure of protest and the necessity for political change to be the true marker of any revolution outside the theatre.

Despite Mnouchkine’s disinclination to celebrate this work as a major part of her canonical achievement over 40 years, contemporary spectators and critics acknowledge that they had never seen anything like it before. Mnouchkine also defers to her contemporary, Italian director Luca Ronconi (Mnouchkine 2005: 132), who had offered a similar environmental experience before this in Orlando Furioso at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 1969. Nevertheless, as historians, now we must acknowledge that this approach from improvisation based on collective research was a crucial template for much of the subsequent work of the company and would inspire many imitators. Although there was no consistently discernible acting form present yet in the wor...