Each spring the great and the good of theatre gather in Taormina, Sicily, for the annual European Theatre Prize. In the past, the palm has gone to great directors and theatre-makers such as Peter Brook, Giorgio Strehler, Robert Wilson and Lev Dodin. This year, refreshingly, the prize - 60,000 euros (around £37,000) - went to the 75-year-old French actor Michel Piccoli, whose career is an object lesson in balancing stage and film.
In Britain, Piccoli is best known for his work in movies by directors such as Luis Bunuel, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, and for what Pauline Kael called his "nuanced control". But in France he is equally renowned as a stage actor. In recent years, he has played Gaev in Brook's Cherry Orchard, Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the title role in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, as well as appearing in Marguerite Duras's La Maladie de la Mort for Robert Wilson. He is a classic example of how an actor can bring the same iron technique to two media without compromising himself in either.
In Sicily we got only a tantalising glimpse of Piccoli's theatrical art. In Catania's handsomely baroque Bellini Theatre, he played the mysterious illusionist, Cotrone, in an hour-long reduction of Pirandello's The Mountain Giants. Cotrone, who has withdrawn from audiences and life, welcomes to his fantastic villa a group of travelling actors, here played by students and children. The staging, by Klaus- Michael Gruber,was rudimentary. But, roaming round the stage like a weary dancer in a black beret, Piccoli beautifully articulated Cotrone's solitude, sadness and Pirandellian belief in the deadening effect of reason - a far cry, it struck me, from Piccoli's own amiability and political radicalism.
Piccoli represents the strength of a great acting tradition. But European theatre is rapidly changing, as shown by the work of the joint winners of Taormina's New Realities prize for more experimental work: Alain Platel and Heiner Goebbels. Last week I saw Platel's extraordinary choral spectacle, Because I Sing, at London's Roundhouse. In Taormina, his Ghent-based company staged Iets Op Bach, which blends dance, drama and music in a way that looks playfully anarchic but I suspect is rigorously controlled. Eight musicians and three singers present formally strict Bach pieces; meanwhile, nine acrobatic dancers offer a physical interpretation studded with violent Catholic imagery and harping on loss of childhood innocence. There are times when I resent the physical interference with the purity of Bach's music but, having seen two Platel shows in quick succession, I cannot doubt his visual wizardry.
What Taormina confirmed, however, is that the theatrical barriers between text, mime, music, dance and video are crumbling fast. Goebbels presented a piece called The Left Hand of Glenn Gould, which used texts by Proust and Kafka, music from a variety of sources and close-up camerawork to explore the human face. It was totally unclassifiable, sometimes nerve-grating, but always intriguing.
In Edinburgh this year Goebbels will be offering a musical spectacular based on Gertrude Stein. And, in Taormina, it struck me that while great texts will always require great actors like Piccoli, European theatre is entering a phase of formal eclecticism that could either produce something startlingly new - or lead us up a chaotic cul-de-sac.
