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Molière, directed by Lorraine Pintal

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

August 11-October 10, 2006

"Molière’s Anti-Comedy"

The Stratford Festival’s first-ever production of Molière’s “Don Juan”, a coproduction with Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, could have been a great success.  Its design is superb and it has an excellent cast with Colm Feore in the title role.  But director Lorraine Pintal’s vision of the play is unsteady and David Edney’s translation has some unfortunate lapses.

“Don Juan” is Molière’s most atypical play.  First and most importantly, it is not a comedy.  After all, this is a play where the title character not only dies but goes directly to hell.  Unlike Molière’s tight-knit plays of the same period like “L’École des femmes’ (1662) or “Tartuffe” (1664), “Don Juan” (1665) is episodic and does not follow the unities of time, place or action demanded by French literary purists of the period.  From Don Juan’s reputation we might assume that the play deals with the famous reprobate’s pursuit of women.  In fact, this activity is depicted in only in Act 2.  Otherwise, Molière is far more concerned to show us that his Don Juan flouts all social, religious and moral conventions in general.

The play was too unlike Molière’s other works and too far ahead of its time to be successful in Molière’s day.  When the play first premiered in 1665, it so incensed the court’s religious faction that cuts were demanded after the first night.  It ran for only 14 more performances and was not published or performed again during Molière’s lifetime.  It was revived once in the 19th century but it was not until a famous revival by Louis Jouvet in 1947 that the play became recognized as the masterpiece it is.

The words “Molière” and “comedy” are so linked in the public’s mind that directors must be tempted to force the play into that mould.  That temptation should be resisted.  After all, just because Eugene O’Neill’s best-known plays are tragedies doesn’t mean that his comedy “Ah, Wilderness!” should be directed as one.  Director Lorraine Pintal seems to recognize this to some degree since she allows so many of the play’s scenes to be played absolutely straight.  These scenes--like Don Juan’s interactions with Dona Elvira, with her honorable brother Don Carlos, with his own father Don Louis or in his temptation of a mendicant--are the most effective in the play.  Unfortunately, Pintal still falls prey to the notion that a play by Molière must be made to be funny whether it actually is or not.  To this end she prefaces the action with about twenty minutes of commedia dell’arte lazzi unrelated to the play in which nine successive actors nonchalantly stroll out on stage only to be transfixed when they realize an audience is watching them.  The joke, of course, makes no sense.  Why should commedia actors on stage be surprised there is an audience?  Besides that, after the same thing happens twice, the repetition becomes tedious.  It would have better to cut the whole sequence, have Benoît Brière as Sganarelle simply make his comic anti-cellphone announcement and start the show. 

As it happens, the least successful scenes in the play are the ones Pintal tries hardest to make funny.  These occur in Act 2 when Don Juan and suite are saved from drowning by a peasant lad and Juan immediately begins the seduction of two peasant lasses.  It does not help matters at all that Canadian translator David Edney has given these Sicilian peasants Newfoundland accents.  That may have worked when his translation premiered in Saskatoon in 1991, but it not only makes the peasants hard to understand but also, given mainland Canadian prejudices, makes them sound like idiots.  (As a side note, I can see why Stratford would choose a Canadian translation, but in the past it has chosen American Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière’s verse plays because they are considered the finest.  Why not seek out the best translation of this play like that of American Stephen Wadsworth based on the 1683 Amsterdam edition, thought to be the closest to Molière’s original text, which has won acclaim wherever it has been performed?)  To make matters worse, Pintal has directed the three peasants to shout all their lines, as if louder were funnier, with the result that the work’s most important discussion of the theme of love is totally lost. 

Pintal’s view of Sganarelle, Don Juan’s chief servant, is another source of irritation.  Sganarelle is not the wily Plautine servant of Molière’s other plays.  Rather he is much like Cervantes’ Sancho Panza is to Don Quixote, the servant who continually tries to point our the realities of the world to his obsessed, deluded master.  The irony in “Don Juan”, of course, is that the master is deluded not by idealism but profound cynicism.  Sganarelle’s pleas with his master to change his ways are earnest and even despairing but seldom comic in themselves.  Pintal, however, has Benoît Brière play all Sganarelle’s lines as comic no matter what their meaning so that Brière’s attempt often backfire since his delivery too often contradicts the sense of what he says.  If that were not enough, Pintal has Brière “heighten” the comedy by acting out the meaning of every line with hand gestures after he says it thus basically doubling the time it takes him to say anything.  Pintal’s pace is already so wearyingly slow that the evening takes nearly three hours when most productions of this rather short play take only two.

The production itself is exquisite.  In its highly dramatic effects it is much more akin to what we are used to in modern productions of opera than theatre.  Danièle Lévesque’s stark white set consists of layers of painted and unpainted scrims rather handily suggesting the layers of Don Juan’s world that Molière pierces through in the course of the action.  Having two people wave a gauzy white curtain is an elegant way to suggest the seaside scene of Act 2.  François St-Aubin’s costumes, that cross the modern with the 17th-century, are sumptuously beautiful.  Don Juan has a new outfit on every appearance to match the Don’s notion that every seduction is a new.  The one oddity is that Sganarelle is attired so much more poorly than the Don’s domestic lackeys.  Why, exactly, would a fashion-conscious person like Don Juan want to be seen in the company of someone who looks like a tramp?  Axel Morgenthaler’s lighting design follows current European practice of lighting scenes to heighten their dramatic impact rather than to recreate naturalistic effects.  He creates a fairy-tale-like haze in the forest scenes of Act 3 and a definite aura of unease in the scenes involving the Commander’s statue.  Robert Normandeau’s music is most effective when it imitates the eeriness and grandeur of Arvo Pärt, less so when it imitates standard suspense music. 

The production has an excellent cast.  Colm Feore is an almost ideal Don Juan.  His “lean and hungry look”, to borrow from Shakespeare, eminently suits Molière’s middle-aged libertine and he looks stunning in St-Aubin’s sensual series of costumes.  His Don Juan seems the ultimate narcissist.  His interest in women is solely in conquest, in proof of his power over them.  Don Carlos, Elvira’s brother who refuses to fight the man who saved his life, seems to be the only man who impresses him because his man-made morality requires no divine sanction.  Feore glides through the action in an unchanging pose of hauteur combined with world-weariness.  If there is a flaw in his performance it is that he gives us little sense why he puts up with the lectures and pleading of Sganarelle.  Feore’s Don Juan seems to hold him in utter contempt, but more logically we should sense that he is at least amused or intrigued by the personality of a humble man who so fervently tries to convert him to conventional morality.  Otherwise, why keep such a nuisance about him?

Veteran Quebecois performer Brière is clearly a fine actor.  It is a pity that Pintal’s interpretation thrusts him into a situation where he comes off so badly.  It is easy to imagine Brière speaking so many of Sganarelle’s lines with a different intonation that would bring out their pathos in contrast to the Don’s cold cynicism rather than having him throw them all away in vain attempts at comedy.  This is particularly true of what should be Sganarelle’s impassioned plea to the Don in Act 3 to appreciate the wonders of the everyday world: “Pouvez-vous voir toutes les inventions dont la machine de l'homme est composée, sans admirer de quelle façon cela est agencé l'un dans l'autre?”  Yet, the clowning Pintal forces on Brière distracts us from the beauty of Sganarelle’s words. 

The actors allowed to play their roles straight do fine work.  Sara Topham makes a fervent Dona Elvira in Acts 1 and 5, particularly impressive in the latter, despite a bizarre black-and-red costume, in convincing us she has conquered earthly passion.  Paul Essiembre cuts a noble figure as Elvira’s brother Don Carlos who argues for honorable behaviour against his hot-headed brother Don Alonso played by Stephen Gartner.  Nicolas Van Burek is overemphatic as Elvira’s valet Gusman but has an excellent scene in Act 3 as a poor man, whom Don Juan maliciously tries to tempt to swear to earn his alms.  Famed Quebecois actor Jean-Louis Roux as the Don’s father Don Louis offers a forceful condemnation of his son as if every fibre of his being were outraged that such an abomination could be his own flesh and blood.  David Francis, in one of the few deliberately comic roles as the Don’s chief creditor Mr. Domingo, is very funny as a man easily blinded with flattery.  Christopher Plummer appearing via video as the statue of the dead Commander makes his few line absolutely chilling.      

Gareth Potter as the peasant Pierrot is talented enough to make his character’s innocence and sincerity shine through the foolish accent and direction imposed on him, whereas these tend to hobble both Martha Farrell and Sophie Goulet as the peasant girls Charlotte and Mathurine.  Pintal draws out the closing scene by having a Ghost, danced by Michelle Galati and choreographed by Donna Feore, flirt with Don Juan before leading him to hell, thus reinforcing one of the play’s theme as if, after two hours, we were too dull to get it.

It’s a pity that so rare and important a Molière should receive so flawed a production when the cast and design are so fine.  Yet any work can be undermined by uninsightful direction and a poor translation.  Those who wish to see the play in the original French have the opportunity at performances on October 12, 14, 17, 19 and 20.  Bonne chance!          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Colm Feore as Don Juan. ©David Hou.