1789

Mnouchkine, Ariane (b. 1934). French theatre and film director, founder of the Théâtre du Soleil. Although her film Molière, une vie (1979) is highly regarded for its interpretation of Molière’s theatrical career and its cinematic inventiveness, she is best known for her successful experiments in création collective. In reaction to the arguably excessive power of theatre directors, she created the Théâtre du Soleil as a workers’ collective, seeking to make the theatrical process a shared responsibility. Its work is underpinned by left-wing political convictions and a desire to make theatre accessible and relevant to ordinary people. The company has experimented with diverse performance styles, from circus and commedia dell’arte to Japanese kabuki and bunraku. Its aim is to fabricate a new theatrical language with which to interpret social and political themes. Its first major success was the celebrated 1789 (1970), an exuberant interpretation of the French Revolution in a popular fairground style. Two subsequent spectacles, 1793 (1972) and L’Âge d’or (1975), one historical, the other contemporary, were also created from documentary sources. Turning to Shakespeare in the 1980s, the company employed its unrivalled ensemble performance skills, to stunning visual effect, in oriental-style productions of Richard II (1981), Twelfth Night (1982), and Henry IV, Part 1 (1984). Oriental techniques were also applied to the ambitious epics based on the lives of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (1985) and Mahatma Gandhi (L’Indiade, 1987), both scripted by Hélène Cixous, and in Les Atrides (1990). —French Literature Companion