June 25, 2004

Incroyable!

[Click on photo to enlarge. Alain Pralon and Muriel Mayette as Argan and Toinette]

Just got back from seeing the Comédie-Français production of Le Malade imaginaire. It was remarkable; I haven't enjoyed an evening of theatre so much in ages.

As I mentioned in the previous post, not all critics have been kind: specifically, the company has been criticized for being too traditionalist; the performance, particularly the masque at the end, has been deemed in need of cutting; and the tone of the production has been described as too dark, a distortion of Molière's comedy. Ignore all this; these critics are wrong—wrong—wrong. The pacing was impeccable: tight, and lively. The masque at the end was dizzying; it broke from the representational mould and transformed the climax of the play into something hysterical, comic and yet savage. This last point is connected to another: perhaps indeed the play was not performed as lightly as is usual with Molière, but this is inevitable. We cannot now think of Le Malade imaginaire apart from the knowledge that the playwright was ill as he wrote it, that he himself played Argan, that he was so weak that he barely made it through the fourth night, and that he died shortly after. How can any actor playing Argan rail against the blindness of doctors and the pain inflicted by their treatments ... for laughs? It must be bleak, black comedy, earthy with its easy references to enemas and close-stools, full of slap-stick, but also steeped in bodily pain. This production got that exactly right. It was performed with a fuller knowledge of history than could have been possible those first four nights. And so perhaps this company is not as unwaveringly traditionalist as some would have it.

The performances were uniformly excellent, though they created more of an ensemble than I would have expected.

The set was atmospheric — a grand but faded room — and the costumes designed to blend rather than stand out.

The group of masquers who acted as the chorus were a treat: slightly malevolent clowns with the most beautiful voices.

It was a memorable production in which verbal wit and physical humour undercut, and were undercut by, harsh satire, which was in turn displaced by a vision of human existence with which we are more familiar from Beckett. The moral centre collapses: Argan's brother, up until the end the voice of reason, and his daughter, the moral centre of the play, both abandon their roles to collude in the ludicrous finale. And that is traditional.

Scribbled at June 25, 2004 11:48 PM AST | Hmmm? (0) | TrackBack (1) | Link Cosmos | More? c17th, reviews




Here's what others have to say about Incroyable!:

» Carnivalesque #1, July/August 2004 from Early Modern Notes
Here it is, just in time for the weekend: some of the best blog writing out there on early modern related topics, from late June (so I cheated slightly...) to the end of August. What a talented bunch. Early in July, George H Williams was to be found......[read more]
Tracked: September 3, 2004 01:11 PM