ABSTRACT
In tracing the interaction between European productions of Shakespeare’s plays and Asia, it is often forgotten that Ariane Mnouchkine’s Shakespeare cycle at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris between 1981 and 1984 was a groundbreaking experiment in formalism that linked Asia and Shakespeare irrevocably in the European cultural imagination. This cycle of three Shakespeare plays set her company on a twenty-fi ve-year pathway to the search for a form in the theatres of Asia. The reformation of the stage and the production of Shakespeare’s plays in France had a long-established relationship in the twentieth century. Mnouchkine’s directing predecessors, such as Jacques Copeau, Charles Dullin, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean Vilar, and Roger Planchon had a fascination with Shakespeare’s texts, as well as a modernist desire for the invention of the new in terms of form. Dullin and Barrault were specifi cally infl uenced by touring productions of Asian theatre forms from Japan and China. Further, the actor, author, and theatrical philosopher Antonin Artaud (whose life cut across and infl uenced many of those directors) also professed a profound source of his inspiration in Asian theatre forms (such as Cambodian and Balinese dancing), as well as in the tragedies of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and in the work of Seneca that had infl uenced Shakespeare himself. Asian theatres, for all of these practitioners, were treated as the crucible of formalism, and their performative vocabularies were used as the templates for the search for a new form of theatre. The march of modernism in European, and particularly in French theatre, was defi ned to a great extent by its relationship with Asia.
