This allows Nelson, who often works in the round, to create a new level of intimacy with the actors. Whereas Mnouchkine likes sweeping, large-scale tableaux, Nelson prefers to zoom in on smaller situations and conversations.
Around a large table, a couple, Nina and Vassily, trade barbs about Vassily’s cheating tendencies. Pyotr, a younger actor, is reprimanded for drinking too much and playing Lopakhin, a central character in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” too coarsely. Masha, another company member, cooks pelmeni, Russian dumplings, for a celebratory dinner, during which everyone toasts the 25th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theater.
Like the company onstage, the Théâtre du Soleil is an ensemble theater, with a permanent troupe of actors and a singular vision, sustained over decades. Its players have a different kind of rapport than freelancers: When the characters sit down to eat together, their banter feels entirely natural. Nelson brings out a welcome new side of them, more casual than Mnouchkine’s directing style.
“Our Life in Art” really shines when Nelson plays up the contrast between the artists’ lives and the ideological pressure they were under in the Soviet Union. The play is book-ended by two letters Stanislavski wrote to Stalin in the 1930s, read onstage by the actor Arman Saribekyan. In them, Stanislavski praises “the great Communist Party” and the “spring of life” it supposedly brought to Russian art. “That’s why I love my homeland,” he says.
Saribekyan explains that Stanislavski signed the letters under duress, and that their sentiment is purposely at odds with the restrained, laconic director we witness in the play, as performed by Maurice Durozier. Stanislavski grew up in an affluent family under the czars before adjusting to the communist system after the Revolution, and Nelson touches on the “re-education” that Stanislavski had to endure.