PARIS, July 7 — During her four decades as an experimental theater director, Ariane Mnouchkine has never doubted the power of the stage to carry a message. She has also never lacked an audience eager to hear it, whether at festivals or at Théâtre du Soleil's sprawling home on the outskirts of Paris. Yet for all her devotion to worthy causes, at age 64 her acute sense of theater continues to prevail.

This is again the case with her latest production, "Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odysées)," or "The Last Caravanserai (Odyssey)," which has been playing here since April and will return in the fall. It is programmed for the Avignon theater festival this month. (Cultural sector workers are threatening to disrupt the festival's opening on Wednesday.)

In this show her theme is the plight of refugees, her unsurprising message that they deserve compassion and understanding. But how this is conveyed is anything but predictable. In a succession of fast-moving and highly stylized scenes, actors re-enact critical moments in the lives of, in the main, Middle Eastern and Asian refugees. The only décor are the props for each scene. Few words are spoken (and those are often not in French). Yet the effect communicates the fear and violence that besiege many refugees as they flee their homes and trek to safer lands.

The subject is particularly topical in Western Europe. Increasing numbers of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers have boosted anti-immigration parties in France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. Until an asylum camp near the French port of Calais was closed last December, Britain complained that France was indirectly encouraging refugees to sneak into Britain aboard Channel tunnel trains. Australia too has taken a hard line against illegal immigrants and refugees.

The issue has also been taken up by artists. It was addressed in 2000 by the photographer Sebastião Salgado in "Migrations," a photo book and a traveling exhibition. The American director Peter Sellars recently turned Euripides' "Children of Herakles" into a commentary on today's refugee crisis. And Michael Winterbottom's new movie, "In This World," which won the top prize in this year's Berlin film festival, follows two Afghan refugees trying to reach Britain.

In "Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odysées)" (a "caravanserai" is an Eastern inn with an inner court where desert caravans rest), Ms. Mnouchkine (pronounced muh-NOOSH-kin) worked mainly with material gathered in 2001 from refugees at the asylum camp of Sangatte near Calais. Other interviews were held in camps in Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia during a tour of her company's last work, "The Flood Drummers," about the social impact of damming the Yangtze River in China.

But rather than simply translate this material to the stage, Ms. Mnouchkine first asked actors to improvise scenes based on their imagination and experience (with 22 nationalities represented on the theater's staff, there was ample experience to tap). Only after extensive improvisation did the actors listen to the refugees' recorded testimonies. Imagination was then tested against reality, before 101 "récits," or tales, were created.

So far only 19 of the "récits" are in the show performed here and scheduled to be seen in Avignon. "We originally intended to alternate récits, but we saw that a loose but coherent structure emerged, which gave force to the production," explained Charles-Henri Bradier, Ms. Mnouchkine's assistant. "It would take many weeks to create a similar ensemble. We may try to introduce new elements in the fall."

The opening show borrows its subtitle, "The Cruel River," from the first scene, a stunning re-enactment of refugees trying to cross a river separating Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. With a huge billowing stage-cloth and a loud soundtrack portraying the stormy river and refugees arguing with smugglers on either bank, the refugees hold desperately onto a rope — one traveler is lost — as they make the perilous crossing.

From this moment the pace of the production never wavers. All the actors enter, perform and leave on low wheeled platforms that are pushed swiftly and silently by other actors or stagehands. Even the props — a health clinic in Sangatte, a home in Kabul, a telephone booth in Paris — are wheeled on and off, creating both a fluidity of movement and a reminder that this is theater's version of reality.

Occasionally scenes are separated by excerpts of letters or testimonies from refugees, which are projected onto a back-cloth in French and spoken in either Persian or Kurdish. The languages of other refugees or of policemen, border guards and smugglers — English, French, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian and German — are also used, with French subtitles appearing on a small screen that pops up at the front of the stage.

Scenes from countries of origin and from the refugees' journeys are interwoven to stress cause and effect. Kabul is still the Afghan capital of the Taliban, where militiamen harass women and fall upon a young couple making love: the woman is next shown dead, either a suicide or executed. In Teheran a young woman returns home from an antigovernment demonstration and screams when her father embraces her: her back is bloodied from being lashed.

In Sangatte a Kurd who has lost his foot is given a metal crutch, which he then plays like a flute; another refugee is caught with two women he is abusing. Then, near the entrance to the Channel tunnel, there are the nightly scenes — at least until late last year when the camp was closed — where refugees cut through wire fences and play hide-and-seek with security guards as they await the signal from smugglers to board a departing cargo train.

Some isolated moments are among the most poignant. An elderly woman preparing to leave Moscow bids farewell to her drunken homeless brother slumped under a telephone booth; her final gift is a small box containing his war medals. In Paris a young woman calls home, and while her brother is too depressed to speak, she reassures her distant parents that they have been well received in France and now live on the Champs-Élysées.

One scene helps explain the widespread preference of many refugees to cross successive European borders and gamble on reaching Britain. "My cousin came off the train in London and was greeted by a policeman," a refugee cheerfully reports by telephone from London. "First he took him to Buckingham Palace and then he said, `Would you like a job? A house?' " In reality asylum-seekers in Britain are kept in special residences until their applications are processed.

Yet, for all the despair it evokes, "Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odysées)" neither points a finger of guilt at the West nor portrays the refugees as invariably saintly. Rather, it takes what can be read in daily newspapers and, through the magnifying prism of theater, gives it a human face. The depth of refugees' need to leave their homes, it suggests, can be measured simply by what they will endure to reach a new land.

The New York Times
Julio - 2003