Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years by Béatrice Picon-Vallin (review)

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• Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years by Béatrice Picon-Vallin
• Kate Bredeson

Béatrice Picon-Vallin, translated by Judith G. Miller, Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2021, 453 pp.

Since 1959, when theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine founded the earliest incarnation of her company—then called the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris—the Théâtre du Soleil has created large-scale worlds and new ways of being in community on and offstage. In her acceptance speech for the 2019 Kyoto Prize, Mnouchkine described the troupe through the metaphor of “the ship, the boat, the skiff,” and offered:

But still I knew that the ship would not travel if every member of the ship did not feel worthwhile, wonderful, and fulfilled, even amidst the dangers and sacrifices that the journey would necessarily demand of us at the beginning. Only at the beginning, I believed then. Now I know that this journey requires the best and deepest within each of us until the very end. Nothing can be taken for granted. Love, friendship, the audience’s respect, must continue to be cultivated every single day.¹

Inextricable from Mnouchkine, the Soleil is known for the company’s soaring vision and stage practices which attempt to shatter Eurocentric boundaries, their long performances (a single performance can exceed ten hours), [End Page 224] commitment to puppetry, music, and dance as a way to tell epic histories, location at the Cartoucherie enclave on the eastern outskirts of Paris, international training, travel, and storytelling, and lively sumptuous and delight-filled performances both on and offstage, which include Mnouchkine herself tearing tickets and serving meals. The Soleil is a political project. The artists contribute to advocacy work, while the Soleil’s building provides shelter for refugees and les sanspapiers. Soleil members participate in protest actions. And the company collaborates with artists in places of crisis, such as their 2005 residency in Kabul. The company operates with a goal of “love” and “respect” and the belief that “Theatre, like art in general, is one of those places that can really improve our world, like an orange grove.”²

The Soleil’s longevity, the size and scope of their productions and vision, and the vast number of people who have inhabited what Mnouchkine calls this “little galaxy of the sun”³ makes the project of writing the company’s history to date a daunting one. French theatre historian Béatrice Picon-Vallin has taken on this task, and the result, Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years, is a detailed archive of this troupe, and the only one that showcases in depth the full history of the Soleil. U.S. French theatre historian Judith G. Miller translates the book with precision and elegance.

The metaphor of the ship is also where Picon-Vallin begins her study, using the Soleil’s 2010 Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir as an example of the extraordinary ambition and scale of the Soleil and the core principle the company holds of collective enterprise. The book unfurls from there in a progression organized by theme (“Collective creation”, “A new way of writing,” “The Soleil brings in a camera,” etc. . .). This is, above all, a history book that documents the evolution of the company and their ambitions and productions. Picon-Vallin focuses on the Soleil’s stage work, activism, international research, and cinema, in addition to rehearsals, design processes, and relationships with audiences. When she lightly brings up controversy—as in the example of the protests against Kanata: Episode 1: La Controverse, she glosses over it; in the case of Kanata, Picon-Vallin dismisses First Nations protestors (citing the “violence of the attacks” against the work); she quotes Mnouchkine, who argued, “Cultures belong to no one” in defense of the production (368). The question of what happens when audiences or company members don’t feel the Soleil’s aspirational “love” and “respect” remains a project for another book. Picon-Vallin’s omission of this discussion seems glaring only because the rest of the book is so rich and detailed.

Picon-Vallin’s goal is to...