Le Théâtre du Soleil has ambitious visions. During the 45-year history of the troupe, which is at present based in Paris under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine, the company has enacted the lives of Molière, Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians on a giant canvas.

Les Ephémères, at the Lincoln Center Festival, is an epic of the everyday. A grief-stricken young woman is selling her house; a doctor examines a recalcitrant patient; children play football. Few of these vignettes are resolved.

Les Ephémères

Deliberately bereft of cohesive plot, Les Ephémères was developed by the uniformly professional actors without a script. Ostensibly, the characters they created were responding to a question: if the world were about to end, what would you do? Such a query appeared in the L’Intransigeant newspaper on August 14 1922, and one of the respondents, Marcel Proust, said: “I believe that if as you say we were menaced with death, then life would become suddenly delicious to us.”

Judging from most of the 29 scenes that make up this two-evening, seven-hour enterprise, the artists took a cue from Proust’s “delicious”: food abounds. This is a brave tactic, more courageous even than the constantly whirling mini-platforms on which the actors perform with hircine firm-footedness. It is brave because the sight of apple tart may make the audience wonder why they did not choose to while away three hours sipping and supping in an outdoor café rather than submit themselves to the straight-backed seats of the Park Avenue Armory, which is configured like a vast surgical theatre.

Luckily, the commitment of the actors and the creativity of the production – which is presided over by the composer Jean-Jacques Lemêtre playing a variety of instruments – make us forget our discomfort. What we are experiencing is plush compared with the exertions of the actors, who must in pairs push the whirling platforms up and down the runway that separates the halves of the audience.

I suspect that some people will find the staging monotonous, just as they will find the retro furnishings (not a mobile in sight) too plain, the lack of era-establishing cultural references too arid, and the soap-operatic acting unsuccessful at eliciting any significant emotional response. One man’s hypnotic is another man’s soporific. I was quite riveted throughout. ★★★★☆

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