In May 1968, student protests in Paris quickly transformed into a revolutionary call to completely transform society, remove economic inequities, and overturn the government run by elites. Collaborating with workers, nine to ten million hourly and salaried employees to shut down factories throughout France (Singer 160). While the turbulent events of May ’68 did not create lasting political changes, they remain fixed in French minds. Theatre has historically served as a forum for advancing political and social change, so it is not surprising that activists in May turned to theatre as a medium to further their revolutionary aims (Miller, Theater and Revolution 43) and that theatrical artists turned their attention to political causes.
One of these theatre companies, the Théâtre du Soleil was permanently transformed by the protests. After the May events, the company strove to better fulfill its collectivist ideals by creating devised theatre pieces with socio-political intent. They recreated the French Revolution in 1789: La Révolution doit s’arrêter à la perfection du bonheur (1970). Through the depiction of this temporally distant historical event, they addressed the contemporary political climate in France. The Soleil’s production of 1789 was deeply grounded in the events of May ’68. The troupe sought to comment on contemporary social and political unrest by showing how the French Revolution, a rebellion begun by the people, had been co-opted by the bourgeoisie (Champagne 36). The troupe combined a Brechtian desire to engage theatre in political activism with an embrace of the physicality favored by Antonin Artaud. Uniquely balanced in the Soleil’s production, each of these driving principals worked together to enhance the overall effect of both. Their production encouraged audience members to reflect on the socio-political situation of the moment and emotionally moved them to continue the fight for greater equality.
Starting with the summoning of the Estates General and the creation of the cahiers de doléances, 1789 highlights a number of historic moments during the years of revolutionary turmoil ending with the Champ de Mars Massacre of July 1791. The play was collectively created through improvisational performances on historic events. However, the company had too many sketches for one play, so the troupe followed the success of 1789, with 1793: La cité révoluitonnaire est de ce monde (1972). This second piece was more somber, mimicking the turn from the jubilant excitement of the start of the Revolution to the horrors of the Terror. Whereas 1789 attempted to recreate the excitement felt during May ’68, 1793 resonated with the feelings of despair felt during the following years when little changed (Garcia 119).
While traditional accounts of the Revolution focus on the actions of great men, the Soleil’s rendition emphasized its material effect on the lower classes. Their production sought to reveal the effect, or non-effect, of the Revolution on the people. The script, written based on the actor’s improvisations of historical texts and events, incorporated various performance styles such as melodrama, puppetry, silent film, mime, cabaret, and circus tricks. Actors, appearing as street performers, introduced and commented on the events represented and at one moment, after the retelling of the Storming of the Bastille, the entire theatre erupted into a circus featuring acrobats, jugglers, and carnival games. This fairground atmosphere disrupted the traditional narrative of the Revolution (Champagne 37).
The Soleil employed the Brechtian technique of historical distancing to encourage spectators to take action. Bertolt Brecht believed that tragic events repeated themselves (Brecht on Theatre 30). By showing historical events, Brecht hoped audiences would see the similarities with contemporary events and discover ways for society to break the cycle of repeating the mistakes of the past. The Soleil had similar goals. By showing the exploitation of the people by the nobility and the clergy as well as their ability to rise up against this tyranny during in 1789, the company created a link between the eighteenth-century Revolution and the revolutionary actions of 1968. The jubilance felt following the storming of the Bastille and the stripping of the church’s and the nobility’s wealth is quickly extinguished by the scene of the Vente aux Enchères where the Bourgeoisie buys those riches and rises to take the place of the elite. The end of 1789 suggests what is to come in 1793: nothing has changed for the people of France except for the faces of their tyrants. This reflected the post-’68 situation. The historical nature of the plays creates distance between the spectator and the action of the play, which in turn allows the spectator to reflect on the power struggles at work in contemporary society.
Brecht created psychological distancing by disrupting the dramatic action of his plays through “songs, film strips, and captions, in order to interrupt the audiences’ customary field of perception, its tendency to take art for life” (Wright 79). The Soleil creates a similar disruption through their use of narration. Actors who play street performers remain outside the action of the scenes in order to narrate them. For example, the written script begins with a typical fairy-tale opening: “Once upon a time…” (Théâtre du Soleil, 1789 7); a presenter announces a subsequent scene with the cries of a ringmaster; and a street performer announces the scene “Le lit du justice” and the characters who will take part in it (Théâtre du Soleil, 1789 18). The stage directions specify that the actor playing Louix XVI mocks his character by making him beg tearfully (Théâtre du Soleil, 1789 18) contradicting an earlier claim that he was incredibly angry. Through the ridiculous manner in which the character is played, the actor highlights the fact that he is separate from the character (Karch 4). The laughable parody of Louis XVI draws a distinction between the actor and the character portrayed while also dispelling the aura of authority around the powers and classes represented. By looking at the character critically, the actor encourages the spectators to take a critical distance from what they have learned of this history and how historical figures have been represented.
Like Brecht, Antonin Artaud also rejected psychological theatre but for a different reason. While Brecht wanted to foster critical distance, Artaud focused on ways of generating sensory stimulation. The Soleil wanted to create distance to encourage critical reflection, but they also strove to emphasize the importance of the body and the senses, like Artaud. Like Artaud, the director of the Soleil, Ariane Mnouchkine believes that the body creates meaning that could not be formed through language alone.
Over the course of thirteen performances, the Soleil filmed 1789 as it was presented to a live audience (Miller, Ariane 64). While films of theatrical performances are unable to fully capture the experience of the live event, the film allows us to see bodily movements and experience the semiotic inundation of sound that were not effectively documented by the stage directions in the script. In one of the first scenes, Miserable Marie squats on the floor of one the stages and scrapes at a bowl of food with her hand; the makeup around her eyes causes her face to look hollow and malnourished. Two actors, the Prelate and the Lord, appear behind her. They tell her that God will bless her house and that the Lord will protect it, and then the Prelate begins to demand his tithe and the Lord his champart, or his share of the harvest. Marie begins to scream as they approach from behind, each grabbing a side of her bowl and breaking it in two, so that she is left with nothing. Her screams last for 45 seconds, long enough for the spectators to have a heightened sense of revulsion.
The emphasis on the Revolution’s impact on the suffering bodies of women and children continues in the next scene. The peasant Anne is in labor and her friend Marie is helping to prepare for the birth by gathering clean cloths and heating water. Her preparations are interrupted by Seigneur who arrives after hunting demanding that his feet be washed and dried. Unable to be persuaded to leave, he soils the water and cloth that had been readied for the newborn. As he does so, Anne and Marie begin to let out blood-curdling screams.
This tableau is quickly followed by the announcement that in this kingdom the women were too weak to feed their children. Four women with babies are shown on four stages, signifying the widespread nature of this problem. Four men, presumably their spouses, arrive to tell the women that they were unable to find wood for the fire or food for their bellies. The space is eerily quiet, and the men are largely silent but for short statements coming from various stages that echo around the room. They ask to take the babies in order to rock them, caress them, and put them to sleep. The women cry out in anguish as they realize what their husbands are about to do. The men cradle the infants and we see the fathers save them from their misery by killing them (Théâtre du Soleil, 1789 9-10). The screams of the women, joined by the men, are pure emotion that overwhelm the audience in both their volume and their expression of distress.
These moments of non-linguistic utterances intrude on historic quotations. For example, the scene of the “Convocation des États Généraux,” immediately follows this infanticide. While the piercing cries of grief and horror still fill the space, a new scene starts with the arrival of the king. Using historically authentic quotations, the actor playing Louis XVI encourages people to send him their complaints. Throughout his speech, the mothers and fathers continue to cry out. The actors’ howling overwhelms the king’s authoritative pronouncements, rendering his words and actions ineffectual. The royal state is working to silence the protestations of its starving people but is ultimately unsuccessful in doing so.
The Soleil also incorporated puppetry in their performance. France, much like the rest of the world, has a long cultural history of using puppetry to make political commentary. The Soleil used large doll-like puppets, approximately three feet in height, that were held by handles on their backs. The arms and legs were flexible and simply moved by handlers like one would a doll. During the scene titled “Les Marionnettes,” the king calls the Estates-General through the use of puppets. Their movements are exaggerated: Necker bends over, folding in half, to kiss the feet of the king; Marie Antoinette convulses in tears, writhing on the stage, because they have no money; and she kicks herself in the face while dancing a cancan. The exaggerated body movements of the puppets create a comic element which, in conjunction with the seriousness of the events depicted, discourages emotional identification with the characters.
The puppets are manipulated by costumed actors who at other moments appear as traditional actors. The visible presence of the actor behind the puppet further separates the spectator from the character. This Brechtian distancing encourages the audience to think meta-critically about the events enacted. At the same time, there is heightened sensory stimulation through the exaggerated movements, a bodily-centered signifying practice which is reminiscent of Artaud’s theories of non-discursive theatricality. These elements combine to emphasize the treatment of the Third Estate while also ridiculing the royal couple, the nobility, and the clergy for their political obtuseness.
In an interview with Beatrice Picon-Vallin for the film 1789, 40 ans après, Mnouchkine says that theatre goers told her over and over again that they thought they were really at the scene of the Revolution. She argues that it is necessary that they become emotionally involved, but that they should never forget that they are at the theatre. 1789 balanced the Brechtian didactic aim of social commentary and of propelling the spectator to action with the Artaudian sensory bombardment of music, color, and movement. Each of these constantly disrupts the other such that together they create a performance that is intellectually challenging and emotionally stirring, while also forming a call to political action.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Translated by John Willett, Methuen Drama, 1964.
Champagne, Lenora. French Theatre Experiment Since 1968. UMI Research Press, 1984.
Garcia, Joëlle. “1793, la cité révolutionnaire est au Théâtre du Soleil.” Etudes théâtrales, vol. 59, 2014, pp. 114-26.
Karch, Agnieszka. “Theatre for the People: The Impact of Brechtian Theory on the Production and Performance of 1789 by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil.” Opticon 1826, no. 10, 2011, pp. 1-7. MLA International Bibliography. Accessed 29 Nov. 2017.
Miller, Judith G. Ariane Mnouchkine. Routledge, 2007, pp. 1-102.
—. Theater and Revolution in France since 1968. French Forum Publishers, 1977.
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—. 1793 : La cité révolutionnaire est de ce monde. Théâtre du Soleil, 1989.
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