✭✭✭✩✩

by Molière, directed by Jean-Stéphane Roy

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

April 12-27, 2002

"Molière High and Low"

For its final production of the season, the Théâtre français de Toronto is present a double-bill of two Molière rarities-La Critique de 'L'École des femmes (1663) and Le Mariage forcé (1664).  Neither play is well known because they belong to genres that no longer obtain nowadays.  And, to be frank, neither is top-drawer or even second-drawer Molière.  Nevertheless, director Jean-Stéphane Roy, by creating a framework for the two works that places them and Molière in historical context, has fashioned a satisfying evening that is more than the sum of its parts and highlights the range of the TfT troupe.

La Critique de 'L'École des femmes belongs to an unusual French genre in which a playwright responds to public criticism of his work.  Molière's L'École des femmes (The School for Wives) was his first great comedy.  Its division into five acts aroused comparison with tragedy and its subject of a man raising a girl in ignorance to be his wife scandalized much of the French public.  In La Critique Molière gathers together a group of six Parisian types who have all seen the L'École des femmes.  Their debate, three for, three against, makes up the body of the play and covers most of the contemporary theories about what goals art should follow. 

Le Mariage forcé was the first play Molière wrote for Louis XIV at Versailles.  It belongs to the French genre of the comédie-ballet and was meant as a vehicle for the king himself as dancer and singer with music by court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.  There is not much of a plot.  Sganarelle, a man of decrepit old age (at 52!), has decided after a life of bachelorhood that he would like to marry the youthful Dorimène.  He asks the advice of three people-his friend Géronimo, the scholar Marphurius and the Egyptian magician Alcantor.  None are of any help.  Meanwhile Dorimène tells her real love Lycaste that since she must marry Sganarelle so that when he dies they will have enough money to live on.  When Sganarelle sees that having a wife will cost him freedom and money, he wants to back out, but Dorimène's brother says if he doesn't fulfill his promise to marry he will challenge him to a duel.  Louis XIV has the chance to sing and dance in one of the Egyptian interludes.

TfT Artistic Director Guy Mignault chose these two works to highlight opposite aspects of Molière's range, from the intellectual comedy of aesthetic debate to the physical comedy derived from the commedia dell'arte.  Jean-Stéphane Roy's framework unites these two.  Before the plays begin, Roy shows Molière confronted with troubles within and without.  In scenes derived from the "Impromptu de Versailles", the company is ready to mutiny because they don't feel they've had enough rehearsal to play without scripts before the king.  For his part the king who loves Molière's comedies, is still under the thumb of his mother Anne of Austria (daughter of Philip III of Spain) who loathes them.  Roy makes of La Critique and its defense of Molière the occasion where Louis, already 22, declares himself king and his mother as subject.  In Le Mariage, Molière's reward for writing a play to showcase the King's own abilities, is to be declared the King's court playwright and instrument, along with the building of Versailles, of making French culture dominate Europe. 

Roy's framing story makes the evening at least a third again as long as it would otherwise be.  But its advantage, besides uniting such disparate works, is to lend additional comedy through the opposing reactions of Louis and Anne to the debate of La Critique and serious consequences to the silliness of Le Mariage.  The double-bill as Roy has conceived it also showcases the range of the actors.  In naturalistic mode they must play the actual members of Molière's troupe.  They must show themselves only partially engaged with their characters in La Critique which they play text in hand.  And in Le Mariage they play in the highly exaggerated style of the commedia dell'arte. 

Olivier L'Écuyer has five roles--Molière in the frame, the comic servant and an effete Marquis in La Critique and the aged friend

and the Egyptian magician in Le Mariage--all of which he keeps admirably distinct.  Dennis O'Connor makes Du Brécourt of Molière's company somnolent and inattentive but as Dorante in the first play he imperturbably defends Molière's position that a play must please the "parterre" above all, no matter what the classical rules may be or the modern rules of decorum.  As Sganarelle in the second play he is truly hilarious in depicting confused senescent lasciviousness.  The best role for Martin-David Peters, Du Croisy in Molière's troupe, is the brainless poet Lysidas in the first play, changing his point of view whichever way the wind is blowing, but he does well in both small roles in the second play, Dorimène's rather passive lover Lycaste and her angry brother Alcidas. 

The three women create distinct characters for the roles in Molière's troupe--Kim Bubbs as the flirtatious Armande, Marie-Hélène Fontaine as the temperamental Madeleine Béjart and Geneviève Langlois as the no-nonsense Du Parc.  Bubbs and Langlois carry these personalities into their roles as the pro-Molière faction in the first play, while Fontaine becomes an excessively prudish précieuse who can hardly bring herself to pronounce the title of the offending play.  In the second play, Bubbs becomes the squeaky-voiced, doll-like object of Sganarelle's lust, while Langlois and Fontaine are two birdlike pedants so entranced with the sound of their own voices they hear nothing Sganarelle asks.  Roy has them interpolate so many avian squawks that what they actually say is impossible to understand.  Sébastien Bertrand makes Louis XIV seem more impetuous than imperious, while Patricia Marceau is truly menacing as the Spanish-accented Queen Mother. 

For the "rehearsed reading" of the first play Glen Charles Landry's raked wooden stage is bare to the back wall of the upstairs space at Berkeley Street.  Don't rush off at intermission or you will miss seeing the legs and canopy hoisted into position.  Landry's lighting is always appropriate to the production's distinct styles.  Costume designer Nina Okens has outdone herself for this show.  The gowns for the actresses in the first play are gorgeous and the outfits for the Egyptians of the second both attractive and fanciful.  But I think most of the audience will remember the complex all-black gown and veil she gives Anne of Austria that make her so malevolent.

Roy has used these two slight works to paint a portrait of the pressures on Molière to conform.  The patronage of the king himself allowed Molière to pursue his own ideas but it also meant serving up vanity productions for his patron like Le Mariage.  While Roy's framework does not have the resonance he thinks it does, it does provide an intelligent foil to make these two obscure works shine more brightly.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jean Stéphane Roy. ©2010.