2 April 1986
Ariane Mnouchkine (right), whose adaptation of Klaus Mann's Mephisto opens at the Barbican tomorrow, is a theatrical legend for her piercing vision and radical individuality: Irving Wardle met her at her home base on the outskirts of Paris for this exclusive interview.
first met Ariane Mnouchkine in 1971 during the run of
her production of 1789 at the Roundhouse--the one and only appearance
of her troupe, Le Theatre du Soleil, in this country. It was also the first
and greatest exercise we have seen in promenade performance, and an explosion
of revolutionary hope that brought down the curtain on the age of euphoria:
1789 and 1968 were both wrapped up in its slogan. "La Révolution
doit s'arréter a la perfection du bonheur".
My only doubt was over her decision to east Gracchus
Babeuf as her principal spokesman for liberty and happiness, given Babeuf's
postrevolutionary decree advocating forced labour and perpetual slavery
for class enemies, as quoted in Herzen's Memoirs, I drew this passage to
Mnouchkine's attention. "Who was this Herzen?" she asked. I said
he edited The Bell and was a prime force in international agitation
against the Tsarist government. "Aha", she said, "but was
he a friend of Marx?" So much for Herzen.
Last week I met her again; this time at her base in the
Cartouchene de Vincennes, the old cartridge depot on the outskirts of Paris
where the presence of three other theatres and a riding stables do little
to dispel the air of blighted desolation peculiar to abandoned military
installations. She took me over her theatre, showing off the set for the
current production of Helène Cixous's Histoire terrible mais inachevèe
de Narodom Sihanouk, roi de Cambodge. It was beautiful, but my memory
went back to the jugglers, fire-eaters and jubilant crowds of 1789 at the
sight of hundreds upon hundreds of blank-faced Cambodian dolls all round
the stage and auditorium, mute witnesses to the atrocities of the Khmer
Rouge and Pol Pot--assuredly a friend of Marx.
Between these productions. the company has evolved through
collective work to Moliere and Shakespeare and--most immediately--Mnoueh
Mnouchkine's adaptation of Klaus Mann's Mephisto, which reaches the
Barbican tomorrow in the not-too-distant
wake of Gordon McDougall's 1981 Oxford-Roundhouse production and the Istvan Szabo film.
Something clearly has changed in the 15 years between
Babeuf and Sianouk, but pressing Mnouchkine for details is a delicate matter
as she is apt to turn on a bright smile and say, "I don't want to talk
about that." One of the things she did not want to talk about was the
film, beyond remarking that its ending contradicted that of the novel. Of
her own adaptation she says: "I found it in a bookshop and thought
it an extraordinary story. I didn't even know anything about Gustaf
Gruendgens [the model for Mann's Nazi collaborator protagonist]. I just
wanted to tell the story about the responsibility of being an artist, and
what guiltiness is and complicity. The story isn't entirely relevant to
democratic countries. You should not compare what's not comparable, and
Nazi Germany is not comparable to France, with all France's defects. But
what happened is still part of our history, and it is very English of you
to ask why we should choose a German subject.
"We turned to one-author texts because we'd gone
as far as we could with collective work in L'Age d'or [1975]. My
job is to put the focus where it should be, and in that piece I couldn't
because the company were so eager to display what they'd created. The limit
in collectivity is the lack of poetry in the text--so it has to be everywhere
else instead. In the beginning I accepted that. But now poetry is my priority,
and if there is poetry in the text it gives birth to the poetry of bodies
and gestures. The collective piece I liked most was 1793 - -the sequel
to 1789. It only played at the Cartoucherie, but it was structured
to be more contradictory and painful; more true. We began to grow up.
"We turned to Shakespeare because he is a school,
and it's natural to go back to school after a certain length of time. For
us, his content is more legendary than political: his way of presenting
events gives us a model from which historical theatre also becomes a possibility
for us. But that has nothing to do with Sihanouk, nothing legendary about
his story, it's a terrible reality."
During the four years of their Shakespeare phase (1981-84)
the company were continuously in work. Now, with the change of government
and the departure of the arts minister Jack Lang (who doubled their subsidy
of two million francs in 1981), there is a shadow over their future and,
when Sihanouk completes its four of the summer ens festivals, they will
have to disband for four months to "pay debts instead of paying ourselves."
There is strong pressure on Mnouchkine to increase the company s output:
" We resist it and do things when we want to do them. We are not Civil
Service actors, and I am still a radical."
I say I no longer know what that word means. "I
do," she replies, and defines it as an attachment to the principles
she set out with--"equal salaries for all; moral equality at work;
company meetings to decide on l'initiative de l'equiper, profound
respect for the public, and respect for the money we are given, which is
not to be wasted on anything we don't believe in."
About 12 of the original company are still with her.
She still takes on inexperienced applicants, the strength of their read
manual work (it could be our interview took pl incessant background of and
electric drilling.) "So partly on iness to do eve this, as ace to an
hammering me people", she says, "have left to form their own troupes.,
They start along the same lines as our theatre, but they change very quickly.
I'm not saying that all they do is bad, but they're less stubborn than I
am."
This statement abruptly brings us back to Mephisto
and to Mnouchkine's film Moliere (shown on French television in 1976-77
to an estimated audience of two million): two studies of an actor-manager
at once under pressure from an autocratic regime while himself ruling the
lives of his own theatrical community. I remind her of a debate in 1972,
and her reply to a heckler who said that what happens before a play reaches
the public has nothing to do with the spectators. "It is as much your
concern to know how a play has been done as it is to know whether or not
the sugar you drink in your coffee has been produced by slavery."
That is still her belief, she says: the conditions in
which something is created leave an indelible imprint on the finished product.
"But it's harder to hold on to that belief now because the moral environment
is so different. Everyone would have said the same thing at that time. Now
everyone says what the heckler said; not least the left-wing newspapers.
The company is still searching for ways of working together in the greatest
possible harmony. But there are times when I feel an anachronism.
Does the Theatre du Soleil still play in stake-hound
factories and other working-class locations? An expression close to bitterness
crosses her face. 'We would like to go to such places if we are desired.
If, one day, the workers said We would really like you to come' we would
go. But I'm not going to say 'Please let us play for you' because I know
it's useless. l hey have changed too. If they want the theatre, they can
make the effort to come to it."
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