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written by Pierre Corneille, directed by Matthew Jocelyn

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 19-September 23, 2006

"To Hell with the Text"

While it is heartening to see Stratford finally explore French comedies written by Molière’s contemporaries just as it is to see it explore 17th-century English tragedies by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, it is very sad that both Webster’s masterpiece “The Duchess of Malfi” (reviewed above) and Pierre Corneille’s great comedy “The Liar (“Le Menteur”) should be staged by directors so enamoured of their own concepts that they almost completely obscure the text of the play they are presenting.

“The Liar” is the second comedy by Corneille that Stratford has mounted.  In 1993 it staged his celebration of the power of theatre, “The Illusion” (“L’Illusion comique”).  Nevertheless, it is “The Liar” from 1643 that is usually held to be the greatest French comedy before Molière, whose first great play, “School for Wives” (“L’Ecole des femmes”), did not appear until 1663.

The plot concerns a young man Dorante, a compulsive liar, who returns to Paris from his law studies in Poitiers with his faithful but exasperated servant Cliton.  In the Tuileries he falls instantly in love with Clarice but he confounds her name with that of her friend Lucrèce.  His friend Alcippe is engaged to Lucrèce and Dorante’s father has arranged that Dorante marry Clarice.  Dorante improvises one lie after another to escape the wrath of both, not realizing that his choice does not in fact conflict with theirs, until the quid pro quo is resolved at the end.

Toronto-born director Matthew Jocelyn, who has lived and worked in Europe since 1980, has taken the play’s theme of improvisation and made it the primary model for presenting the play, determining everything from line readings to who plays whom.  At the very beginning of the show, the eight actors enter one by one and choose from among eight arrows protruding from the front of the Studio Theatre stage.  They are colour-coded but with the names hidden, three for the young male roles, three for the young female roles and two for the older male roles. 

The actor first introduces his- or herself, mentions what other roles they are playing at Stratford this season, picks an arrow and that is the role he or she will play in the performance.  Thus, more likely than not, every performance of the play will have slightly different casting.  In the performance I saw on opening night, Lawrence Haegert drew “Dorante”, Gordon S. Miller “Alcippe”, Stephen Kent “Philiste”, Laura Condlln “Clarice”, Jennifer Mawhinney “Lucrèce”, Severn Thompson the maid “Sabine”, Barry MacGregor “Cliton” and Raymond O’Nell “Géronte”, Dorante’s father.

The actors then repair to the back the stage designed by Alain Lagarde with its make-up mirrors, racks of costumes, blown-up photos of rehearsals and groups of props and equip themselves for their chosen role.  Lagarde’s costumes allow the cast to remain in what appear to be their street clothes (though these are, in fact, designed, too) and merely pull over a skirt or put on the appropriate jacket.  The costumes are made of patchwork material as if they were also improvised and some, as in the dress for Sabine or the coat for Cliton, are embroidered with text from the play. 

The actors play, script in hand, while the lights remain up throughout as if the show were really a rehearsal.  Jocelyn has directed the actors to use the entire theatre, aisles and all, as their playing area, so that if there were any fourth wall on the Studio’s thrust stage it is thoroughly broken.

All this is fine and creates an atmosphere of fun and unpredictability.  If Jocelyn had stopped there, his concept would be firmly established and we as audience could get on with getting to know what for many will be an unfamiliar play.  But no, Jocelyn encourages the cast to take the concept of improvisation to far greater extremes.  Cast members comment on their lines in Ranjit Bolt’s excellent 1989 translation, how certain eye-rhymes (“want”-“pant”) don’t really rhyme, how the meter is sometimes off, how they disagree with what the character has to say or enjoy saying a line so much they repeat it. 

Sometimes they pretend not to be able to make out a line and have audience members read it; they often read out all the stage directions; in one scene they read all their lines pronouncing all the punctuation marks; sometimes they call on the stage managers for help; they get into a side discussion of what else is playing at the same time as their show and the night I saw it broke out into a song from “Oliver!”; one actor leads extras from the cast of the other play on at the Avon, in this case “London Assurance”, from backstage at the Avon across the Studio stage; in a night scene all the lights are turned off and the cast reads their scripts by flashlight and so on.  When the actors hold up their hands like a dog and say “Pause”, you wonder whether Jocelyn’s concept is really just an intellectualized version of the anything-for-a-joke technique that has spoiled so many comedies at Stratford over the past several seasons.  

All of the improvisations, interruptions and deconstructions of the text and the performance were received with much laughter.  None, however, was accorded to Corneille’s text itself.  How could it?  Jocelyn has done everything possible to distract attention away from the text and to his concept for the production, a concept that moreover could be used to undermine any play, not just this one.  Jocelyn focusses our interest on the actors not on the characters they play and on their fooling around not on the story.  No wonder, then, that the play’s not-too-difficult plot becomes almost impossible to follow.  You leave the theatre feeling not that you have seen Corneille’s “The Liar” but a directorial wank-off by Matthew Jocelyn.  As Jennifer Mawhinney spontaneously exclaimed at one point, “To hell with the text!”

One difficulty of requiring actors to improvise while playing a classical text is that some are inevitably better than others.  Lawrence Haegert’s comments were the most consistently funny and outshone Gordon S. Miller’s and Stephen Kent’s by far.  Laura Condlln thankfully played Clarice almost completely straight, a definite boon to anyone who was actually trying to follow the plot.  Except for her one pointed comment, Jennifer Mawhinney’s impromptu remarks tended more towards mere silliness and she played Lucrèce in such a way that the character seemed rather Clarice’s maid than a noblewoman of the same rank.  The role of Sabine gave Severn Thompson little chance to show the acting talent she so amply displayed during her time at the Shaw Festival.  Raymond O’Neill seemed to enjoy himself, but it was Barry MacGregor who was best able of anyone in the cast to play a character, move the plot forward and comment on it at the same time.

It is all a great shame.  If you want to see improv, you go to Second City not Stratford.  Anyone who wants to see Corneille’s great comedy will just have to hope that some other company dares to stage it with at least some modicum of respect for the text.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Promotional graphic for The Liar. ©2006.