Hey, that was entertainment. And it still is, at least in the thrilling version created by Mnouchkine and her gifted performers. Mnouchkine has taken the “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’s trilogy on the accursed house of Atreus, and preceded it with Euripides’ “I phigeniain Aulis” to make the story complete. It is, simply and overwhelmingly, our story, the story of the human race in its attempt to shake off the endless cycle of violence and replace it with the rule of law.
The ancient Greeks would have laughed at our debates over violence in the arts. Their theater was awash in blood. The myth of the house of Atreus is an epic sideshow–infanticide, regicide, matricide, patricide, every kind of -cide, plus cannibalism and assorted horrors. In the first play, the Greek king Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the gods as he embarks on the Trojan War. In “Agamemnon,” his wife Clytemnestra takes vengeance by killing her husband and his Trojan captive, the prophetess Cassandra. In the next play, “The Libation Bearers,” Agamemnon’s son Orestes, supported by his sister Electra, keeps the vengeance cycle going by killing his mother and her paramour Aegisthus. In the final play, “The Eumenides,” the Olympian deities Apollo and Athena engage in a trial o Orestes, who’s opposed by the the Furies. Orestes is acquitted, and the murderous cycle is ended.
Such are the bare and bloody bones of these complex and potent dramas. Mnouchkine’s staging brings to life that old saw, “total theater.” Drama, music, dance, brilliant costumes and makeup, but above all, energy, galvanize the huge stage space. Mnouchkine does wonders with the chorus, who constitute from play to play a microcosm of the body politic. It’s a dancing, chanting body politic, swarming like acrobats over the high walls that flank the stage, leaping down again to reform in a battalion of blazing color.
The Theatre du Soleil, founded in 1967, is based in the Cartoucherie in Paris, an 18thcentury munitions factory. The company is a theatrical General Assembly from more than 20 nations. The leading players speak French with a passionate precision (in Brooklyn there will be headsets transmitting an English translation). Simon Abkarian, an Armenian, takes the roles of Agamemnon, Orestes, a coryphaeus (Chorus Leader), even Orestes’s old Nurse. Juliana Carneiro da Cunha, a Brazilian, plays Clytemnestra and Athena. Indian-born Nirupama Nityanandan plays Iphigenia, Cassandra, Electra and a leader of the Furies. Catherine Schaub, the chief coryphaeus throughout the cycle, is astonishing as she moves from powerful speech to eloquent song to sensual, ecstatic, shoulder-shaking dancing. Schaub alone is total theater.
Mnouchkine has boldly grafted an Oriental performing style-mainly the precise, ritualized gestures and masklike makeup of the Indian kathakali theater-onto this bedrock work of Western theater. In a time of burgeoning ethnic enmity, the stage becomes a synthesis of East and West. This feeling reaches a climax in the final play, “The Eumenides,” when Athena imposes a new harmony on the family whose internecine war is a symbol of all human conflicts: Mnouchkine turns the three chief Furies into bag ladies, dressed in tattered duds and sneakers, and costumes their Chorus as hellish dogs, snarling, growling, cowering and cavorting. It’s an unforgettable image. These Furies want blood, but Athena cajoles them into accepting a new identity-Eumenides, the “kindly ones,” who take their place in a new civic order of democracy and justice. As the cycle ends, the dogs, fearful and confused, slowly rise on their hind legs. Animal bloodlust has become human understanding.
The Greek plays are profoundly political and spiritual. That’s the theatrical ideal of Mnouchkine, 53, a handsome woman of passionate intellect. For her these 2,500-year-old works have a sharp relevance to today’s social traumas. “As artists our mission is to warn-to yell, to shout and to celebrate any small victory,” she says. “What’s happening in Eastern Europe is terrible. These Greek plays train the intelligence and the senses. They’re full of demons, and today a big demon has been defeated, but all the small ones have been let loose.” “Les Atrides” evokes, identifies and dispels those demons.
