STAGE REVIEW : MNOUCHKINE TRAGEDY IS A MARATHON

“My story is not a terrible tragedy by William Shakespeare,” says Georges Bigot as Sihanouk, a smiling, padded buffoon who struts the length and breadth of the Theatre du Soleil’s huge space in tiny, rapid steps, like a puppet on a short string threatening to keel over. Never believe it.

It is symbolic of the hapless clown prince that he never capsizes, but navigates through tidal waves of political treachery and intrigue and still survives.

In Ariane Mnouchkine’s latest historical drama, “The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia,” performed in two marathon evenings of 4 1/2 hours each, Bigot is the leading player in a modern tragedy whose ending, as the title says, is still to come.

If this freewheeling account of the decimation of Cambodia (1955-79) also emulates Shakespeare, the similitude is intentional. Chalk it up to Mnouchkine’s directorial brilliance and her taste for the tongue-in-cheek. The result is anything but docudrama.

Born of a combination of efforts involving Mnouchkine, writer Helene Cixous, musician/composer Jean-Jacques Lemetre and the Soleil’s rigorous ensemble, “Sihanouk” is a swirling, effervescent piece of pure theater--highly stylized and quasi-Cambodian (as her Shakespeares were quasi-Kabuki and quasi-Kathakali) that could only have been developed in the bosom of a company whose artists know one another by heart.

The actors are mostly in exaggerated makeup, some having blacked out their teeth or ringed their eyes to affect an Eastern look; some wearing masks; all given to running entrances and exits and to a large vocabulary of other body language.

They also know how best to use their spatial setting. The Soleil’s home is the Cartoucherie, a former munitions factory in the woods of Vincennes, as large as a sound stage and as vast as the world.

Around the room’s periphery an upper gallery is packed with 600 wooden dolls in varied Cambodian costumes. Carved and built by Erhard Stiefel and the company, they are the people of Cambodia--living and dead--watching their history unfurl.

Everywhere, simplicity prevails. On the bare stage, a saffron canopy becomes a royal hall. Three stiffly aligned armchairs denote the chill of a Peking meeting room. A trap door, like a grave, disgorges the terror of peasants. Drum rolls and a quaking curtain announce the entrance of important people. The half-gesture here is everything.

Yet the production’s real achievement is its ability to become genuine tragedy, starting with the sentimental, egocentric figure of this prince who rules unwisely and not too well. Like Richard II (whom he even quotes in one of the production’s less inspired moments), this Sihanouk grows in dignity and pathos as he diminishes in stature.

The Shakespearean analogies are abundant and natural. The play is full of asides and direct address. Sihanouk is surrounded by a full portion of Shakespearean figures: his father’s ghost (Guy Freixe); the queen, his wife (Helene Cinque); the queen mother, Kossomack (Odile Cointepas); the Horatio of the piece, Penn Nouth (Maurice Durozier), and a contingent of assorted villains, traitors and tyrants ranging from Pol Pot, Lon Nol, Chou En-lai and Alexei Kosygin to Henry Kissinger and Gen. Creighton Abrams.

Most engaging and skillfully incorporated, however, are the rustics--a resourceful Madame Khieu Samnol, vegetable vendor of Phnom Penh (in a beautiful performance by Myriam Azencot) and her more despairing Vietnamese friend Madame Lamne (Clementine Yelnik), who sells fish.

They are the product of pure fantasy, creating a subtext that snakes through the main story setting its temperature and calling its tone. The broad, earthy laughs of the beginning scenes between these women are gradually replaced by the bumbling of growing alarm and, in time, by the full tragedy that they do not escape. Aside from being profoundly affecting, this device is a masterful way of driving home the social impact at the bottom of political power struggles at the top.

Because these are fictional creations, they are the most successfully realized. The courtlier scenes, peopled as they are by familiar names, don’t always escape a measure of self-consciousness, expository weightiness and a tendency towards cartoon. Even the image of Sihanouk as a dangerous innocent is itself dangerous. Theater is, in its way, as manipulative as politics.

Only in the broadest sense can one call this theatrical masterwork a lesson in history. On balance, Mnouchkine has achieved what she set out to do. She has created a beautiful, impartial and disturbing piece of art. If it also alerts us to a situation that most of us in the West have prefered to ignore, so much the better. At least it is done with verve and style.

Can one ask for much more?