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by Molière, directed by Guillaume Bernardi

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

April 20-May 5, 2007

This year the Théâtre français de Toronto is staging an excellent production of a rarely performed play by Molière.  In George Dandin (1668) Molière takes a commonplace of French farce, a husband cuckolded by his new wife, and gives it two unusual twists.  First, Dandin (Martin Albert), a rich commoner, has married Angélique (Colombe Demers), the daughter of impoverished aristocrats.  The question of whether money or title in more important makes this an edgy satire.  Second, Angélique, in contrast to her name, is not the usual innocent woman held captive by a jealous husband but, as Demers portrays her, a woman whose obsession with her lover Clitandre (Julian Doucet) borders on depravity.  Thus, contrary to expectations, Molière puts the audience in sympathy with the cuckold and his feeble attempt to combat a world of privilege and vice.  By shifting the setting a century forward director Guillaume Bernardi only enhances the play’s bitter mood of pre-revolutionary discontent.

Bernardi has admirably captured the play’s complex balance of comedy and tragedy.  He brings out such bile in the angry exchanges between Dandin and Angélique that Molière seems look forward to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman.  Martin Albert gives a powerful portait of a bottled up rage that seems at once both comic and dangerous.  Demers’s Angélique is rather over the top seeming more like a sexual vampire than a human being.  Robert Godin and France Gauthier are hilarious as Angélique’s conceited parents who falsely equate nobility of birth with nobility of mind.  The whole production is one of the most successful attempts this reviewer has ever seen at revealing the pitch black world view that lies just beneath the brilliant comic surface of Molière’s greatest plays.                  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-04-23.

Photo: Julian Doucet and Colombe Demers. ©Nir Bareket.