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by Molière, directed by Guy Mignault

Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

April 25-May 10, 2014

Mascarille: “Les gens de qualité savent tout sans avoir jamais rien appris”

Théâtre français de Toronto usually concludes its season with a classic comedy, usually by Molière.  This year is no exception with its production of Molière’s comedy from 1659, Les Précieuses ridicules.  The play is one of Molière’s most delightful, but it is also quite short, a mere twenty pages in most editions.  The most logical solution to including this play in a full evening’s entertainment would be to pair it with another one-act play by Molière, such as his Sganarelle which he wrote in the following year for the same company of players.  Unfortunately, TfT does not take this route.  Instead, director Guy Mignault has decided to fill out Molière’s comedy with a whole range of variety numbers.  These number may sometimes be thematically related to what a character has said, but the effect is of fine wine that has been watered down by half.  The filler is strictly hit and miss in quality and only serves to blunt the impact of Molière’s play.

As is the case with Molière’s earliest comedies, the plot is quite simple.  Two noble suitors, La Grange (Nico Racicot) and Du Croisy (Christopher Webb), have had their proposals of marriage rejected by two young ladies from the country, Magdelon (Chanda Legroulx) and her cousin Cathos (Andréane Bouladier), much to the displeasure of Magdelon’s father Gorgibus (Robert Godin).  The two young women’s view of love is based solely on novels they have read and they want the complications of adventure before they are resolved by marriage.  Starting with marriage, they say, is like beginning a book at the end. 

Besides this, the fad of préciosité, once in fashion in Paris, has now spread to the provinces and has been adopted by the young women who mistakenly think they are up-to-date.  Part of préciosité was the adoption of ultra-refined manners and hyper-correct scruples of behaviour along with the invention of euphemisms for ordinary objects in order to remove coarseness from their vocabularies.  Thus, in Molière’s play, the young women refer to chairs as “les commodités de la conversation” much to the confusion of their servants.

To have revenge on these précieuses, La Grange has his valet pose as the Marquis de Mascarille (Sébastien Bertrand), who pretends to be a highly sophisticated young man with entry to all the best salons in Paris.  He is later joined by his friend the Vicomte de Jodelet (Alexandre Côté), another of the same type.  Once Magdelon has fallen in love with Mascarille and Cathos with Jodelet, their masters burst in and expose the two men about town as mere lackeys thus causing the two précieuses to realize they have made themselves ridicules.    

Simply performing the play would have been delightful.  Unfortunately, Mignault has given it an elaborate and nonsensical frame in a vain effort to relate préciosité to the present day.  The cast is presented as if they were a gathering of nouveaux-riches in the midst of a party in a penthouse in one of Toronto’s superflux of condos.  There are songs, including the Jewel Aria from Gounod’s Faust sung by Nathalie Nadon, and anecdotes, such as Lina Blais’s account of shopping at a supermarket for the first time.  At one point Sébastien Bertrand asks us jokingly if we’re wondering when the play will ever begin, and I must admit I certainly was.

As it turns out, Mignault’s concept is that these nouveaux-riches will be staging Molière’s comedy for our and their own amusement.  Mignault, however, has linked the pretensions of the nouveaux-riches to those of the précieuses, so, in fact, it makes no sense that they would stage a play where they are the butt of the satire, unless they are supposed to be so stupid that they don’t realize it. 

The performance of the play itself is continually interrupted by songs from other periods which not only ruins the pacing necessary to comedy but forces us to recall each time where we were in the story before the interruption.  In doing so it makes Molière’s tight little comedy bloated and dull. 

The physical production is fine Glen Charles Landry has created a surprising spacious playing area for the action.  He uses cloth to makes the walls of the condo so that on occasion Simon Rossiter can light up figures behind the wall to comment on the action.  Nina Okens costumes are fully 21st-century in the frame, but morph into costumes with a 17th-century cut and accents for Molière’s play.

TfT has mounted successful double bills in the past like Un Caprice and Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermé by Alfred du Musset in 2000 and has even staged triple bills like the two plays by Sacha Guitry with one by Georges Feydeau in 2005 or Molière’s three one-act plays about doctors in 2010.  Why Guy Mignault did not seek a suitable partner for Les Précieuses ridicules among the wealth of French one-act plays by Molière, Marivaux and others, is a mystery.  The present production seems less like an expanded play by Molière than a third-rate variety show that happens to include scraps of Molière’s play.  Let’s hope that in future if a one-act play is considered for production it will be part of the kind of double or triple bill TfT has done so well in the past. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Chanda Legroulx, Sébastien Bertrand and Andréane Bouladier; the cast of Les Précieuses ridicules as nouveaux-riches. ©2014 Marc Lemyre. 

For tickets, visit http://theatrefrancais.com.