Stage Struck

Mad hope springs eternal, writes PETER CRAWLEY

IT'S HARD to tell when the new show by theatrical legend Ariane Mnouchkine actually begins. But one thing is for certain: the experience of Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, now playing in Paris, begins long before the curtain rises.

For some, it starts with the eternity spent ringing the Théâtre du Soleil’s antiquated box-office: the only way to book tickets is by phone, and your call has the same guarantee of success as playing the lottery blindfolded. For others, it begins with the bewildering effort to discover the home of the renowned 46-year- old French theatre company, in the Bois de Vincennes in east Paris, which reveals itself (if at all) like a secret base in a fairytale forest.

But it really kicks off with the unparalleled delight of finally getting inside the former munitions factory. You queue to choose your seat, there's no hierarchy, and everyone passes beneath a newly painted sign that reads Liberté Égalité Fraternité. Théâtre du Soleil was founded as a collective, and all jobs in the theatre are shared for an equal, modest wage.

The cavernous front of house is transformed into a nostalgic “guinguette” restaurant where actors in costume serve the audience meals. As Mnouchkine herself barrels around the space in stretch-waist pants and corkscrew curls of silver hair, the world of the play and the world of the audience begin to blur into each other.

Loosely inspired by a Jules Verne novel, Hélène Cixous’s play has the kitchen staff reappearing in a restaurant in 1914, lending their service to a socialist film- maker shooting a silent movie in which, essentially, socialist utopia is the goodie (yay!) and avaricious colonialism is not (boo!).

That story within the story may be simplistic, but the methods used to create it are endlessly inventive. Actors from the 40-strong cast expose the artifice of fantasy, tugging at the loose threads of coat-tails to emulate the billow of the wind, throwing handfuls of snow into the camera shot to replicate a storm.

Whether it’s the underwater weightlessness that conjures a shipwreck or the astonishing feats of choreography necessary to sweep up an avalanche worth of fake snow, the ingenuity of stagecraft is a constant marvel.

The real exposure, though, may be into Mnouchkine’s practice. As the idealism of her fictitious film-makers begins to buckle under the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the Socialist leader Jean Jaurés, so the communal ethos of Théâtre du Soleil’s ensemble seems a fragile anachronism, itself a vessel of “mad hope” in a storm of crashing capitalism. But the company remains an indefatigable inspiration, and although the production was nearly a year in rehearsals, it is really built on decades of development.

In a way, this is a show that began 46 years ago, and it’s one that must go on.

• In the last Stage Struck, Jack Phelan was credited with designing the "video systems" for Rough Magic's Sodome my love;the video was the work of designer John Comiskey.