Tambours sur la Digue (review)

Abstract

TAMBOURS SUR LA DIGUE. By Helene Cixous. Directed by Ariane Mnouchkine. Theatre du Soleil, Paris, September 18, 1999. Ariane Mnouchkine has long been associated with a stunning directorial style incorporating aspects of performance techniques. Inspired by Artaud's dictum that theatre is oriental, she infuses Western realism with the seductive color, passion, spectacle, and physical discipline of non-Western and premodern theatrical genres. In addition, she is committed to theatre that is politically progressive, feminist, antiestablishment, communally created, and financially accessible to all members of society. Mnouchkine terms her work kabuki because she is interested neither in authentic re-creation nor in culturally correct representation. She has said: are not resuscitating past theatrical forms, commedia dell'arte or Chinese theatre. We want to reinvent the rules of the game which reveal daily reality, showing it not to be familiar and immutable but astonishing and transformable (quoted in Adrian Kiernander, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil [1993], p. 89). As early as 1961, she directed Genghis Khan by Henri Bauchau. Like much of her later work, Genghis Khan offered a morally ambiguous portrait of a powerful man presented in an imaginary Asian performance style. After touring Asia, she cofounded Theatre du Soleil in 1963. Her subsequent Asian-influenced works included a rotating repertoire of Shakespeare, Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV (1981-1984); a four-play cycle of Greek tragedies, Les Atrides (1990-1992); and original, commissioned works set in Asia and written by Helene Cixous, including L'Histoire Terrible Mais Inachevee de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge (1985), L'Indiade, ou l'Inde de Leurs Reves (1987), and the current Tambours sur la Digue (1999). Mnouchkine's Shakespearean and Greek productions were superbly theatrical-brilliantly conceived creations in which and Western performance styles blended into unforgettable theatre. The original plays, though theatrically arresting, often suffered from scripts that tried too hard t o make political points and represented real or fictional characters in a problematic way. Tambours sur la Digue (Drums on the Dike) is no exception. Though brilliantly directed and performed, the script is deeply flawed. It is an earnest, naive, oriental fable set in a mythical realm that is partly China and partly Vietnam. The overlong, blood-soaked, stereotyped script (partly in verse) concerns the victimization of peasants, doomed to drowning by greedy rulers, and the hero and heroine's valiant attempts to rouse the villagers by means of stirring (Korean) drumming. The respected feminist Helene Cixous clearly attempted to write a Brechtian work; the result, however, is disturbingly orientalist. Double-dealing characters, for example, have a penchant for whipping out their swords at the slightest provocation to disembowel themselves or each other. Intentionally deliberate, highly enunciated speech--apparently meant to evoke Japanese acting.--slows down an already labored script. After three and a half hours (including a dinner break) and countless false endings, the weary audience is thorou ghly confused. Despite the script's defects, the production offers breathtaking innovations in performance style. Tambours sur la Digue is subtitled Sous Forme de Piece Ancienne pour Marionnettes Jouee par des Acteurs. …