ABSTRACT
The Théâtre du Soleil can perhaps best be said to have formed around Ariane Mnouchkine in 1964: it consisted of a group of actors and technicians from the Association Théâtrale des Etudiants de Paris, which had been founded by Mnouchkine while she was a student of psychology, but from the outset the working principles which were sought were ensemble-, not director-dominated. A spirit of amateur enquiry informed much of their early work, which had an almost deliberate naïvety of approach to a magpie collection of forms and styles. There were to be no ready-made answers to the question they were asking themselves through her as mediator. Echoing Copeau, she formulated this as ‘Are we the agents of a past that is beyond repair? Or are we rather the harbingers of a future which can barely be discerned at the extreme limits of a dying epoch?’ In her view these questions were ones that all contemporary theatre practitioners were trying to answer,
