“Here are the dragons”: at the Théâtre du Soleil, Ariane Mnouchkine slides towards caricature, from the Bolshevik revolution to the invasion of Ukraine

Ukrainian flags fly everywhere in the vast theater hall. Ariane Mnouchkine has not lost her temper since February 24, 2022, the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Large ballot boxes wrapped in the colors of the Ukrainian flag are available to the public. An actor from the troupe invites us to make a donation, the amounts thus collected will be used “to buy drones” for Ukraine, “weapons to save lives, not to kill”he specifies. Applause in the room.

A life-size picture book

” I believewrites Ariane Mnouchkine, that like all our shows, this one was born from an emotion and a question that many of us have been asking ourselves for two years: how, in the 21st^e century, have we reached the point of attempted invasion, enslavement, destruction of an independent country by another power? What, over the decades, creates a leader, I would say a man, such as Vladimir Putin? To try to answer this question, we had to try to tell, theatrically, the birth of a system that changed the world. I should say two systems, because the war of 14 will nourish Nazism as much as Bolshevism. (…) We therefore immersed ourselves in History and realized that, to tell the story of February 24, 2022, we had to go back to February 1917! »

The show gets off to a flying start. Mnouchkine’s double, played by Hélène Cinque, jumps from his pit to attack the video screen where Putin’s face is projected in close-up justifying his intervention in Ukraine.

The face distorts under the blows, the voice trembles until it becomes inaudible. Freeze frame. We rewind the thread of History, from the trenches of northern France to Petrograd. The scenes will thus follow one another, without downtime, until exhaustion, with changes of scenery on view, changes of costumes behind the scenes.

A book of life-size images whose pages turn to the rhythm of these pre-revolutionary days in Petrograd which precipitated the fall of the Tsar. Back and forth at full speed between street scenes and domestic scenes within the Douma.

Behind their masks, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are agitated

1917. Victory was in our hands is the first part of an upcoming trilogy, Here are the dragons. For Ariane Mnouchkine, there is no doubt, Putin is Lenin’s heir. At the origin of evil and the evils of the 20th century^e century, the First World War which gave birth to two totalitarianisms: communism and Nazism.

Strengthened by this axiom inspired by the writings of Stéphane Courtois in his Black Book of CommunismMnouchkine deploys his theatrical know-how in the service of a small, well-oiled agit-prop theater. Behind their masks, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky move, fidget, rub their hands. In the streets of Petrograd, citizens are agitated, fidgeting, quarreling, brandishing the red flag.

The revolution has barely blossomed when the leaders share power. This hegemonic Great Russia extending its tentacles to neighboring countries, the same one which today invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it is the Bolshevik revolution which would be the matrix, Mnouchkine tells us. Forgotten, Great Imperial Russia, forgotten Peter the Great, forgotten Catherine II. On the stage, the appearance of the tsar, a sort of hieratic figure, is staged in such a solemn manner that one almost mourns the end of his regime.

A historical misinterpretation with a classic ideological aim

Because how can we not see that by waving Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky like puppets, it is indeed the communist utopia and, beyond that, any revolutionary ideal that is being pointed at. If Stalin’s crimes no longer need to be demonstrated, what new, unprecedented light does Ariane Mnouchkine’s theater bring us by rehashing this old idea of ​​a strict twinship between communism and Nazism?

We would think we hear Macron dismissing the far right and the New Popular Front back to back. Furthermore, attributing the Stalinist regime to Lenin and October 1917 is a historical misinterpretation with a classic ideological aim. A little crude but no attempt, no gain…

Especially since Putin poses as the heir of the totalitarian system of Stalin, or even of Peter the Great, not of the revolution of 1917. And even less of a Lenin to whom he never refers. Between the Soviets of 1917 and Stalinism, Putin chose Stalin, who thus allowed him to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

A strange feeling of weariness and disappointment

But Mnouchkine does not budge. Even the convulsions of the people on the set do not succeed in qualifying their ideological posture. His justified condemnation of the war in Ukraine seems to close the door to the slightest utopia. But then, what is the point of theater if it is not the place of a shared utopia, an agora of thought awakened at work?

Here, at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, we are served a cold and bitter borscht. We are far from Mandate or Suicideby Nicolaï Erdman, who paid a high price, under Stalin, for the outrage brought to the very Little Father of Peoples through his two Soviet vaudevilles, irreverent and impertinent.

If on the set of the Théâtre du Soleil the tension is palpable, if the actors impress with their commitment, we leave the theater with a strange feeling of weariness and disappointment in front of this caricatured picture book.

Until April 27, 2025, at the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris 12^e. Such. : 01 43 74 24 08.