In Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine and her actors challenge Russian demons with panache, from Lenin to Putin

Published on December 27, 2024 at 9:27 p.m. / Modified on December 27, 2024 at 9:30 p.m.

4 mins. reading

In the fray ofHere are the dragons, this show where everything captivates. Vladimir Illitch Lenin suddenly bursts onto the stage of the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, perched, like a drunken commander, on a locomotive that cuts through the night and the chaos of 1917. He exhorts, in Russian, a crowd whose jubilation is spreads in flames, he calls for the overthrow of the badernes, he vociferates, like a gnome on his ghost train, he vampirizes resentments, he unites humiliated. He escapes from the hells of the Théâtre du Soleil and its founder Ariane Mnouchkine, just like this paltoquet of Nicholas II, this proud Léon Trotsky, this dandy of Alexandre Kerensky, like a whole people too, carried away in the whirlwind of a sumptuous fresco.

But let’s step out of the fray for a moment. It’s 7:28 p.m. the other Friday, and you are at the gates of the Sun, after having feasted, in its immense hearth, on borscht and Ukrainian pirojki. Her strong soul, Ariane Mnouchkine, welcomes you there, as always for sixty years. She is hospitality even at the entrance to the room, robust and valiant like the rhapsode who walks the perilous paths of memory, epic mane because you cannot change yourself at 85 years old. In bulk come up the shards of The terrible but unfinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (1985), from Drums on the sea wall (1999), d’A room in India (2016), hosted in Lausanne in 2018, at the invitation of Omar Porras.

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