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by Molière, translated by Richard Wilbur, directed by László Marton

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto

August 8-September 23, 2000;

National arts Centre, Ottawa

November 29-December 16, 2000

“Funny but Frightening”

Anyone who has never seen the way Molière is often performed in Europe will be in for rather a shock when they see Soulpepper’s production of "School for Wives".  While over here even Molière’s greatest plays are done primarily as light, frothy entertainments, in Europe critics and directors have long known that one source of Molière’s greatness is that his comedies actually deal with serious issues and often come as close to tragedy as the comic genre will allow.  In 1995 Ariane Mnouchkine famously set "Tartuffe" in pre-Revolutionary Iran, with the result that Tartuffe’s power became much more frightening than comic.  On a much smaller scale, Hungarian director László Marton brings about a similar effect in a "School for Wives" that is poles apart from Richard Monette’s production of the same Richard Wilbur translation for Stratford in 1991. 

Where Monette’s version was visually bright and sunny, Marton’s is dark and almost Dickensian in atmosphere.  Where for Monette Brian Bedford as Arnolphe, though a petty tyrant, remained perfectly charming throughout, Joseph Ziegler for Marton  is an ill-natured, self-torturing monomaniac.  Where Monette allowed every line to be merely a joke, Marton makes us see in Arnolphe’s tyranny over his would-be wife the uncomic spectres of misogyny and class prejudice.  This very dark version of Molière will not be to all tastes, but it will be an eye-opener to those who previously have never seen just how serious his plays can be.

     

As in so many of Molière’s plays, the central figure, Arnolphe, is consumed by an obsession--in this case, with the fear of cuckoldry.  In order to avoid the kinds of taunts he hurls at other men, he has had a girl, Agnès,  brought up from the age of four with the sole purpose of becoming his wife.  He has deliberately made sure that she is completely ignorant of life, the better to follow his orders blindly.  After her miseducation in a convent, he has kept her mewed up in a house and guarded by two servants, also chosen for their ignorance, until she is of age to marry him.  Marton makes clear that Arnolphe’s perversion of Agnes’s life is a sign of his own not-so-hidden perversion.  Despite all his well-laid plans, a young man, Horace, son of an old friend, has fallen in love with Agnès and she with him.  Much of the comedy in the play arises from the fact that Horace does not realize that Agnès’s keeper is the "friend" to whom he reveals all his plans.  Yet, even this comic plot reaches a near-disastrous conclusion before all is made well by a deus ex machina.  As in "Tartuffe" Molière uses this device to show that only something extraordinary can divert the course of the play from tragedy.

   

Marton’s dark vision of Molière’s play confronts us when we first enter the theatre.  Julia Tribe’s set shows a high, metal circular fence surrounding Arnolphe’s house and looking more like a cage than a fence.  The irony of the play is that while Arnolphe is trying to cage Agnès, in fact it is he who has no mental freedom, so bound up are his thoughts with his idée fixe.  Marton has moved the action from the 1662 of the play’s first performance to the early 19th century, the high point of Romanticism in France.  This fits perfectly with the theme of the play of love as a reforming power, superceding all rules and conventions.  Tribe’s astute costumes instantly inform us of the characters’ relationships--Arnolphe primarily in black, Agnès in white, and the others in earth tones.  The servants’ dilapidated clothing shows us their mistreatment before we hear of it, while the rich outfits of Arolphe and his friend Oronte place them in the upper middle class.  Andrea Lundy’s lighting is far removed from the pristine effects she uses in "Betrayal".  Here she creates a gloom in the house even when it is day and by frequently backlighting Arnolphe’s makes him (literally) a darker figure.

   

Unlike Brian Bedford’s charming and self-satisfied Arnolphe, Joseph Ziegler appears harried and obsessed from the start.  After all, he has overseen a 14-year plan to turn another’s life to his own uses.  Where Bedford, as is his wont,  addressed Arnolphe’s frequent soliloquies directly to the audience, Ziegler plays them as tortured interior monologues we happen to overhear.  This conveys the unsettling impression of a man trapped in his own pattern of thought.  Ziegler succeeds so well in making Arnolphe a study of a  disturbed personality that we can actually pity him when his horrid plans are at last overthrown and we see him in a state of despair.  The counterforce to this monomaniac is the raisonneur figure, Chrysalde.  Robert Persichini is an interesting choice for this role.  As the voice of reason, this kind of character is often downplayed.  Persichini, however, has the large stature and sonorous voice that makes him dominate Arnolphe in each of their encounters, thus giving greater weight to his careful outlining of Arnolphe’s folly. 

   

Whereas Ann Baggley was a relentlessly perky Agnès for Monette, Liisa Repo-Martell turns in a finely nuanced performance.  We see her move from a girl who has been made deliberately stupid to a woman in fearful rebellion against the man who did this to her.  In the scene when Arnolphe makes her read the maxims of marriage, we see slowly dawn on her the realization that her guardian is really a monster.  It is really quite chilling.  As her lover, Horace, Matthew Edison accomplishes the difficult feat of giving a  quirky, interesting personality to an otherwise generic role.  I’ve never seen one of these smitten young fellows played so well. 

   

As the two benighted servants Raoul Bhaneja and Kristen Thomson are comic but in a more limited way than usual.  Marton chooses not to have them realize the wrong of what they are doing, thus restricting the range of their roles.  In an approach I’ve never seen before, Marton has the slapstick they engage in cause us not to laugh but wince.  They thus extend rather than relieve the unpleasant atmosphere of lasciviousness and danger.  Jim Warren makes the small role of the Notary humorous and memorable, while William Webster as Horace’s father and Mark Christmann as Agnès’s round out the cast.

   

For years now at Stratford, classic plays have been trotted out with little sense that their directors have anything in particular to say about them.  This production, like Soulpepper’s "Don Carlos", The Misanthrope" and "Platonov" before them, dusts off an old classic and makes it new.  Let us hope Soulpepper continues this process.  

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Joseph Ziegler and Matthew Edison. ©2000 Soulpepper Theatre Company.