Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Molière, directed by Diana Leblanc
Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
April 8-23, 2011
“Les Maximes du mariage”
Théâtre français de Toronto is staging a new production of Molière’s L’École des femmes (The School for Wives) as its final offering of the 2010/11 season. The 1682 play is the first in Molière’s great series of comedies featuring a monomaniac in the central role, later to followed by such characters as Oronte in Tartuffe (1664), Alceste in Le Misanthrope (1666) and Argan in Le Malade imaginaire (1673). In many ways, Arnolphe of L’École des femmes is the very worst of these and the TfT production succeeds so well because does not try to disguise the darker aspects of the story.
The obsessions of Oronte, Alceste and Argan cause misery for their families and friends cannot be classed as criminal. Not so with Arnolphe, who is guilty at the least of forcible confinement and whose desires are perverse to say the least. He took care of Agnès, a 4-year-old girl living in a nunnery, and for 13 years has groomed he to be his wife. This involved keeping her guarded in his country house and teaching her absolutely nothing except reading and writing so that she would remain completely ignorant of the outside world. His theory is that since he would be the only man (except of a servant) that she would know, she would automatically love him, and more important, always be faithful to him.
It is very difficult nowadays in light of news stories about fathers who have kept their daughters captive to find anything comic about this situation. Director Diana Leblanc has updated the action to the 1940s and set it in a village near Montreal. This only makes Arnolphe’s behaviour less palatable since we cannot dismiss it as some historical quirk of the 17th-century.
In line with this darker view of Arnolphe, Alain Doom gives us a performance that is less comic and more a study of a study of a man who suffers from a deep psychological illness. Early on Arnolphe says of himself that he “un esprit malade” and near the end his friend Chrysalide tells him, “Vous voilà bien malade”. Doom does not give the outgoing Arnolphe that Brian Bedford did in Stratford 1991 production that that Joseph Ziegler did in Soulpepper’s 2000 production. Instead, he is morose and withdrawn and paralyzed by the thought of loss of control over Agnès. He meets every tale of Horace’s success in winning Agnès’s heart with an expressionless face as if the fears he has always harboured are becoming true. About a third of people with an obsessive-compulsive personality also suffer from depression and this seems to be exactly what guides Doom’s interpretation.
Molière’s monomaniacs are all very close to tragic figures since at the end of the play they flee or are excluded from society. Despite the obvious creepiness of a man looking upon a 4-year-old as his future wife, Doom makes it clearer than Bedford or Ziegler did, that Arnolphe is truly in love with Agnès. It may be a perverted sort of love, but it is love nonetheless. Doom played this with such intensity that at the end of the play when he loses Agnès to Horace, I was surprised that we did not see a silhouette in the second storey window of Dominic Manca’s set of Arnolphe hanging himself in despair.
Adding to the serious tone is Thomas Gallezot as Chrysalide, the raisonneur figure of the play. In the early scenes Gallezot speaks to Arnolphe with an urgent pleading in voice as he tries to dissuade his friend from his overwrought fear of cuckoldry. In the later scenes, Gallezot, quite unlike the usual raisonneur, lectures Arnolphe out of duty but with a sense of the utter futility of his actions.
With two of the key roles plays so earnestly, it is up to the rest of the cast to create the comic mood. Jean-Michel Le Gal is excellent as Horace, bubbling over with the excitement of love and the success of his ruses against Agnès’s unknown keeper. Molière’s young male lovers often have little personality, but Le Gal makes Horace seem vital by carefully gradating Horace’s joy as he comes nearer to his goal. Geneviève Dufour is an ideal Agnès. Petit and doll-like, she at first seems to be exactly the unthinking puppet that Arnolphe wants in a woman. But with each meeting with Horace, she becomes more of a human being who begins to question--at first completely innocently, then with more pointedly--Arnolphe and his plans. France Gauthier and Jean-Simon Traversy are dependably comic has Arnolphe’s two servants whose morality shifts depending on who pays them more. Robert Godin carefully distinguishes his two roles as the pedantic Notaire and the proud Oronte, and designer Glen Charles Landry makes a rare appearance as an actor as Agnès’s long-lost father, here an American from the South, who speaks French with a heavy American accent.
Dominic Manca’s set is more elaborate than us usual at the TfT. Its best feature is a large shaded window on the second floor meant to be Agnès’s room where director Dian Leblanc is able to stage various comic scenes in silhouette. The front of the set extends too far forward so that actors frequently must move from the path that runs in front of Arnolphe’s house onto the terrace of the house behind the path just to have enough playing area to move about in. The village where Arnolphe’s country house is located has a view of the cross on Mont Royal that lights up as night. This symbol does not merely indicate the setting but acts as a reminder both of the Christian virtues that Arnolphe violates and of the institutionalized misogyny of the Church that sees women as lesser beings who cannot be accorded the same privileges as men. As Arnolphe says, woman is to man as “Le valet à son maître, un enfant à son père.” The book of maxims that Arnolphe gives Agnès to read about marriage is, unsurprisingly, written by a priest.
The reason why Molière’s comedies still speak to us is that they critique states of mind and social strictures that have not fundamentally changed. His comedies have depths that, in this case, can be very dark indeed. Leblanc recognizes this and, unlike so many directors of Molière, does not try to cover up the play’s more disturbing aspects. This is comedy to make you think as much as laugh.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Alain Doom and Jean-Michel Le Gal. ©Marc Lemyre.
2011-04-10
L’École des femmes