Mnouchkine, Ariane 1939-

PERSONAL:

Born March 3, 1939, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, France; daughter of Alexandre (a film producer) and June Mnouchkine. Education: Attended Oxford University and the Sorbonne, 1959-62.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Théâtre du Soleil, Cartoucherie, 75012 Paris, France.

CAREER:

Writer and film and stage director. Théâtre de Soleil, Paris, France, cofounder and director, 1964—; director of plays, including Gengis Khan, 1959; The Petty Bourgeois, 1964; The Kitchen, 1967; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1968; The Clowns, 1969; 1789, 1970; 1793, 1972; The Golden Age, 1975; Mephisto, 1979; Richard II, 1981; La Nuit des rois, 1982; Henry IV, Part I, 1984; The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, 1985; Indiade, 1987; Les Atrides, 1991; and Tambours sur la digue (title means "Drums on the Dyke"), 1999; director of film Molière, 1978, and of television miniseries Molière, ou la vie d'un honnête homme, 1981.

MEMBER:

Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris (cofounder).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy Award nomination, 1965, for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for L'homme de Rio; Prix des Associations de Spectateurs, 1967; Critics' Prize, 1967; Golden Palm nomination, Cannes Film Festival, 1978, César Award nomination, 1979, for best director and best film, all for Molière; Picasso Medal, UNESCO, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(With others) That Man from Rio (screenplay), Films Ariane, 1964.

(With others) Les Clowns (play), produced in Aubervilliers, France, at Théâtre de la Commune, 1969.

(With Sophie Lemasson and Jean-Claude Penchenat) 1789: Textes réunis et présentés (play), Stock (Paris, France), 1971.

(With others) 1793 (play), produced in Paris, France, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1972.

(With others) L'age d'Or (play), produced in Paris, France, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1975.

(With others) Don Juan (play), produced in Paris, France, at Cartoucheries de Vincennes, 1977.

(With Jacqueline Saunders and Philippe Caubere) Molière (screenplay), 1978.

Mephisto: Le Roman d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann (play; based on a novel by Klaus Mann), Solin (Paris, France), 1979.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, Richard II (play), Solin (Paris, France), 1982.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, La Nuit des rois (play), Solin (Paris, France), 1984.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Première partie (play), produced in Paris, France, at Théâtre du Soleil, 1984.

La Nuit Miraculeuse (television screenplay), 1989.

(Translator) Aeschylus, L'Orestie: Agamemnon (play), Théâtre du Soleil (Paris, France), 1990.

(Translator) Aeschylus, L'Orestie: Les Choephores (play), Théâtre du Soleil (Paris, France), 1992.

(With Josette Féral) Dresser un monument à l'éphémère: Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (interviews), Éditions Théâtrales (Paris, France), 1995, revised edition, 2001.

(With Josette Féral and others) Trajectoires du Soleil: Autour d'Ariane Mnouchkine (interviews), Éditions Théâtrales (Paris, France), 1998.

Tambours sur la digue (television screenplay), Théâtre du Soleil, 2003.

Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (play), produced in New York, NY, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ariane Mnouchkine is one of the founders of—and the driving force behind—the famed Théâtre du Soleil of Paris, France. She helped start the company in 1964, and has served as its director ever since. Though she is known primarily as a director, she has also collaborated on plays and on the film Molière with other members of Théâtre du Soleil. She has translated plays by Shakespeare and Aeschylus into French, and penned the 1979 play Mephisto: Le Roman d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann. Mnouchkine is also famous for her production of the works of Hélène Cixous, including The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia and Les Atrides.

Born in 1939, Mnouchkine is the daughter of a Russian film producer who immigrated to France. As a child, she often visited her father's sets and was deeply interested in his work. By the time she went to Oxford University as a young adult, though, she had decided to major in psychology. She joined the University Drama Society there, however, and fell in love with the theater. When Mnouchkine came back to Paris in 1959, she and some friends formed the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris. Through this organization, she directed her first play, Henry Bauchau's Gengis Khan.

After taking a few years off in the early 1960s to tour Asia, Mnouchkine returned to Paris and, with former members of the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris, created the Théâtre du Soleil. She directed its first production, The Petty Bourgeois by Maxim Gorky. Aside from Mnouchkine, the members of the troupe are predominantly actors, but in keeping with the group's leftist political orientation, they often collaborate on the plays themselves. Plays that Mnouchkine has created with members of the Théâtre du Soleil include Les Clowns, 1789, and L'age d'Or.

As for her work as a translator, "Mnouchkine's Shakespearean and Greek productions were superbly theatrical—brilliantly conceived creations in which Asian and Western performance styles blended into unforgettable theatre," stated Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei in the Asian Theatre Journal. Gerald Clarke reported in Time that Mnouchkine used Asian cultural motifs for her interpretation of Shakespeare: "Japanese for Richard II, Indian for Twelfth Night and a mixture of both for Henry IV, Part I."

Mnouchkine's Mephisto is based upon a novel by Klaus Mann, the son of the famed German novelist Thomas Mann. The play centers on a troupe of actors performing in Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era. "At its core is the Faustian story of provincial actor Hendrik Hofgen," reported Laura Weinert in Back Stage West, "whose desire for renown leads him to discard his political sensibilities and pander to Nazi audiences to live what he imagined would be a successful artistic life dedicated to the pursuit of truth." Michael Lazan noted in Back Stage that "to illustrate Hendrik's arc, the playwright switches gears, sometimes relying on a Brechtian style complete with skits, dance numbers, and songs, and sometimes relying on sober, straight scenes." Stephanie Coen concluded in American Theatre that "the world Klaus Mann and Mnouchkine depict" is one "where each individual—martyr, coward or hero—is an active participant in his or her own destiny."

Les Atrides is a ten-hour spectacle based on four Greek plays: the "Oresteia" trilogy by Aeschylus and Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides. A performance epic in size and scope, a 1992 staging in New York required the expenditure of over one million dollars to remove vehicles and weapons from the Park Slope Armory in Brooklyn so that the sprawling facility could be used as a stage. Les Atrides "is clearly the work of a major artist," observed Robert Brustein in the New Republic. Mnouchkine, Brustein noted, "has committed her life to transforming the ways in which we think about the stage."

The main character, Clytemnestra, is ignored, mishandled, and finally killed by the gods around her. Her husband, Agamemnon, kills their daughter Iphigenia in a sacrifice to war gods, including Artemis; Agamemnon abandons her, but she seeks revenge for her daughter's death. She is killed by her own son, but the gods ignore her pleas for retribution. "At every turn she is a victim of politics, deemed more important than matters of the heart," observed William A. Henry III in Time. "Although the critical and public reception for Les Atrides was in general overwhelmingly positive …, not surprisingly, the response to this as to other Mnouchkine productions frequently mirrors the very mindsets that the work tries to theatrically interrogate: apolitical universalism, obliviousness to colonialism, and a subtle or open bias towards women in power," observed Sarah Bryant-Bertail in the Theatre Journal. During the lengthy and often physically uncomfortable performance, "Your body may sag, but your soul is lifted," commented Brustein, "for if Les Atrides subjects you to theater of pain, it has its moments as theater of imagination and majesty as well."

In Tambours sur la digue, Mnouchkine presents a play based on a series of events in China in which large tracts of farmland were flooded without any warning to the population. When the city of a Chinese feudal lord is threatened by a rapidly rising river, the decision must be made to breach the dike and divert the floodwaters away from the city. Many people will be killed by this action, but even more will perish in the city if something is not done quickly. "Who is to die is the dreadful moral question" posed by the play, commented Nicholas Powell in Variety.

Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) is a two-part play cycle that "brilliantly displays the forthright agitprop style of director Ariane Mnouchkine and her Parisbased Théâtre du Soleil," commented Marilyn Stasio in the Daily Variety. The "sprawling piece depicts the wrenching displacement of people uprooted by war and cast adrift in a world ill-prepared (and shockingly resistant) to absorb them," Stasio observed. Inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and based on firsthand accounts accumulated by Mnouchkine and her players from refugee camps in Australia, New Zealand, France, and Thailand, the play tells a variety of stories of refugees and asylum seekers from different parts of the world. In a dangerous border area between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, refugees cross a raging river with the help of a smuggler; once across, the refugees and the smuggler revert to their racial hatreds and begin hurling insults at each other. A black refugee snaps upon boarding a plane, and is involved in a violent fight with security in which it appears that he is killed. An old Russian woman climbs a chain-link fence and gets stuck near the top, while below, the smuggler who had helped her for a fee is knifed to death. When she makes her way back to the ground, she rifles through the smugglers clothes until she finds and recovers her money, and only then prays over the dead man's body. During what appears to be a sea rescue, refugees enduring the harshness of the ocean are devastated when an apparent rescuer descends on a rope to tell them that Australia will not accept them.

"Some of these testimonies are moving and poignant, but the piece is just a series of fragments, lacking a guiding hand to unify them into a coherent whole," commented Brustein in another New Republic review. However, Brustein also noted that "Mnouchkine has devised at least two stunning episodes, both featuring fragile boats on a boiling ocean, that leave you with your heart in your mouth, even though the tumult is only simulated, Asian-style, by means of billowing silken cloths, roaring noises, and flimsy props." "Taken in pieces, this is devastating theater," Stasio concluded. "In deliberately refusing to put the pieces together, Mnouchkine is surely leaving that job up to us."

"Mnouchkine's theatre is virtuosic, international and lavish," commented Robert Marx in American Theater. "Mnouchkine's work is spellbinding, in part for its eerie beauty, unrestrained energy and power, but also because its Asian-influenced anti-realism is so remote from anything American—or, for that matter, French," Henry noted. As the driving force behind the Théâtre de Soleil, Mnouchkine imposes considerable discipline upon her players. "Her highly physical approach to acting, derived from many different Asian techniques, is rigorous and disciplined. Strict rules of behavior apply backstage—punctuality, no smoking during rehearsals, sobriety, two hours of preparation before each performance," Marx reported. However, "These are not conceits, but a philosophical approach to the entire experience of theatre for both artists and audiences," Marx concluded. "Under Mnouchkine, the company challenges the traditional notions of theatre as an institution, as a bourgeois enclave reflecting middleclass values, and has put in its place a popular theatre inspired by collaborative writing and infused with collective energies," commented the International Dictionary of Theatre essayist. "Characteristic of the work of the Théâtre du Soleil is the sheer pace of performance; this, together with the vivid use of color in costume and props, lends the company its uniqueness. Its productions are dazzling, even breathtaking, while at the same time thought-provoking and iconoclastic."

In a June 2005 profile in the Village Voice online, Charles McNulty observed that "Mnouchkine still simmers with radical passion, even if her grandmotherly appearance (white shock of hair, eyeglasses on a string around her neck) and coolly polite, occasionally bristling manner might lead some to mistake her for a semi-retired Parisian shopkeeper rather than one of Europe's bona fide directorial visionaries." Powell called Mnouchkine "one of the great figures of French theater and one of the few … of a generation for which the director was the most important ingredient in any play."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 3, Actors, Directors, and Designers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Kiernander, Adrian, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, May-June, 1994, Robert Marx, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 52; November, 1996, Stephanie Coen, review of Mephisto, p. 22; May-June, 2005, "Ariane Mnouchkine: A Message for World Theatre Day," p. 59.

Asian Theatre Journal, spring, 2002, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, review of Tambours sur la digue, p. 255.

Back Stage, August 31, 2001, Michael Lazan, review of Mephisto: Le Roman d'une carrière d'après Klaus Mann, p. 56.

Back Stage West, November 8, 2001, Laura Weinert, review of Mephisto, p. 13.

Daily Variety, July 20, 2005, Marilyn Stasio, review of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 7.

Modern Drama, September, 1990, Adrian Kiernander, "The Role of Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil," p. 322; March, 1992, Adrian Kiernander, "Reading, Theatre, Techniques: Responding to the Influence of Asian Theatre in the Work of Ariane Mnouchkine," p. 149.

New Republic, November 9, 1992, Robert Brustein, review of Les Atrides, p. 36; September 5, 2005, Robert Brustein, "On Theater—Theater of the Mushy Tushy," review of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 25.

New Yorker, August 1, 2005, John Lahr, "The New Nomads," review of Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), p. 88.

New York Times, June 5, 1986, John Rockwell, "If Length Were All, or, Why a 10 [frac12]-Hour Play?," p. C23; July 28, 1991, Michael Ratcliffe, "The Greeks, with an Accent on the French," p. H5; May 27, 2001, Ron Jenkins, "As If They Are Puppets at the Mercy of Tragic Fate," pp. AR5.

Performing Arts Journal, September, 1993, John Chioles, "The ‘Oresteia’ and the Avant-Garde: Three Decades of Discourse," p. 1.

TDR, fall, 1994, Sallie Goetsch, "Playing against the Text: Les Atrides and the History of Reading Aeschylus," p. 75; summer, 1995, David Williams, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 179.

Theatre Journal, March, 1994, Sarah Bryant-Bertail, "Gender, Empire, and Body Politic As Mise en Scene: Mnouchkine's Les Atrides," p. 1; October, 1995, Juli Burk, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 432; October, 1996, Judith G. Miller, review of Tartuffe, p. 370.

Theatre Research International, summer, 1994, Brian Singleton, review of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 175; spring, 1996, Brian Singleton, "Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine: Dresser un monument a l'ephemere," p. 91.

Time, June 25, 1984, Gerald Clarke, profile of Théâtre du Soleil, p. 67; October 5, 1992, William A. Henry III, review of Les Atrides, p. 83.

Times (London, England), April 2, 1986, "An Artist's Response to Guilt and Complicity," profile of Ariane Mnouchkine.

Times Literary Supplement, January 18, 1991, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, "Exposing the Fathers of Tragedy," p. 15; August 18, 1995, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, review of Tartuffe, p. 17.

Variety, September 27, 1999, Nicholas Powell, review of Drums on the Dyke, p. 158.

ONLINE

Alternative Theater, http://www.alternativetheater.com/ (June 19, 2006), biography of Ariane Mnouchkine.

Internet Movie Database,http://www.imdb.com/ (June 19, 2006), biography and credits of Ariane Mnouchkine.

Open Society Institute Web site,http://www.soros.org/ (June 19, 2006), "OSI Forum: Reviving Theater in Afghanistan: A Conversation with Ariane Mnouchkine."

Village Voice Online,http://www.villagevoice.com/ (July 12, 2005), Charles McNulty, "Homeward Bounding," profile of Ariane Mnouchkine.