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Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir; The Rape of Lucrece; Mies Julie – review

Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre; Royal Lyceum; Assembly Hall, Edinburgh
    • The Observer,
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Th  tre du Soleil
Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir: ‘At times the action rolls across the vast stage as easily as if the actors were made of water.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer

"We have waited 48 years to come to the Edinburgh international festival," said Ariane Mnouchkine. Audiences have waited too, and it has been worth doing so. Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, the latest enormous creation of Mnouchkine's inspiring Théâtre du Soleil – the company founded in the early 60s and based in a former munitions factory beyond the Bois de Vincennes east of Paris – is a tale of utopian visions and wrecked dreams. "Half written" by Hélène Cixous, and devised by the company, it springs from a posthumously published story by Jules Verne and features film-makers, archdukes, voyages to Patagonia, voracious lovers, idealists, assassinations, bounty-hunters who make necklaces out of human ears, deaths in snowy wastes and theatre-making. It is magnificently plural.

  1. Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores)
  2. Royal Highland Centre,
  3. Edinburgh
  1. Until 28 August
  2. Box office:
    0131-473 2000
  3. Details

Mnouchkine's own theatre-making is like no other. In Edinburgh, as always, the audience is involved in the show before it begins. En route to the auditorium you pass through a plywood proscenium arch and see behind a lace curtain the cast getting ready: chatting, combing swatches of false hair, reading (Dickens's Les grandes espérances), having a back massage, applying eye liner, grinning at the gawpers behind the lace. This is no mere amuse-bouche: watching artifice build, observing the mechanisms, is fundamental to a show that the audience sees through several pairs of eyes.

A young woman, perched high on a ladder between stage and audience, watches a piece of family history unfold. It's 1914 and the owners of a small restaurant have rented their attic to a group of leftwing film-makers. Restaurateur and his staff observe and are caught up in the making of their silent socialist tale, whose every effect is openly manufactured: the weather is created by sprinkling snow on a cap, or tugging at a scarf to show a character whipped by wind. Members of the cast play two, often three parts, frequently switching gender. Their own love lives interrupt those of their characters. Théâtre du Soleil's own composer plays the onstage music man: his towering soundscape, shifting from La traviata to cabaret to Carmina Burana, is the yeast of the action. Meta-theatre, you may think. Well yes, but it's better than that.

Here is the paradox. The heart of the show is its most obviously artificial part: the silent movie, with its declamatory language (seen in surtitles), its worldwide leaps of action, its wobbly gestures, its simplicity. But here is the Mnouchkine genius. This improbable artificial thing, a thing made up in front of your eyes, takes on its own life and becomes not only absorbing but revealing and provoking. Melodrama becomes heartfelt; silence becomes eloquent. When characters debate the principles of their utopia, they do so exactly, fiercely, resoundingly. It seems that the more transparent you make things, the greater the transformations you can work.

At times the action rolls across the vast stage as easily as if the actors were made of water; at times it freezes into detailed tableaux – who would think that, on so wide a stage, faces peeping out of portholes would register so vividly? The groupings, set against huge cloudscapes, are never simply picturesque: they wire you into the action. The cast spring together round the prow of a ship as if they really were going to cleave the waves with the strength of their idealism; when news breaks of the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the socialist hope, everyone is pushed back to the edges of the stage as if humanity were about to be driven asunder. As indeed it was.

Camille O'Sullivan's rendering of The Rape of Lucrece is an astonishing leap by the RSC. Against large and beautiful tarnished panels, to the intermittent accompaniment of Feargal Murray's insistent thrumming piano, O'Sullivan creates a dark and dazzling cabaret: she scorches a path through the congested passages of some of Shakespeare's most stately verse and tells the story as if it were her own and now.

George Galloway would, I think, agree that what happened to Lucrece was not unrequested insertion but rape, even though she had entertained her attacker earlier in the evening. The consequences were momentous. Having denounced her assailant to her husband, she committed suicide and precipitated the downfall of a Roman dynasty.

O'Sullivan strides on in a black greatcoat, her hair scraped back; she peels down to a white shift and lets her hair tumble loose while describing the rape. She commands the lighting, which dims with the undulations of her wrist. She moves almost undetectably from song to verse to tranced recollection. She comes close to the audience as if she were going to share a secret. She suggests the enchantment of Lucrece's beauty for her attacker, stroking the air as if caressing a body. She makes unforgettably plain the violence that has been wrought on her: "her blue blood chang'd to black".

This is the second time in this year's festival that an Irish actor in big black boots has taken a non-dramatic text and staged a mesmerising monologue. First Barry McGovern's Watt, now O'Sullivan's Lucrece. That is almost a theme. O'Sullivan should take her recitations of sexcapades further: imagine what her velvety voice might make of Keats's The Eve of St Agnes.

August Strindberg always had at least one foot in the "she was asking for it" camp: his 1888 Miss Julie can make hard (and unconvincing) watching. Yet Yael Farber's radically remade, sell-out version of the play, Mies Julie, makes it teem with new and terrifying life.

Transposed to modern-day South Africa, the action is set in the kitchen of a farm on the 18th anniversary of the first post-apartheid election. The farm workers are celebrating; the febrile white daughter of the house is mad with unhappiness; in the corner, a young black man sits polishing his master's boots. His mother (a clever remodelling of the thankless part of a fiancee) has had her fingerprints erased by years of domestic service and so cannot prove her identity to vote.

There is drought. A fan casts shadows; the guttural music of a Xhosa musician stalks the action; and Miss Julie's fragile birdcage swings in the air. Every generation has neglected its children. Years of damage have rotted relationships and a country. The violence and desire between mistress and servant has never been more furious, steaming or convincing. Though part of the fringe, this production could belong to the international festival; in March it will be staged at London's Riverside Studios.

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