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by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, directed by Jean-Paul Tribout

Lucernaire, 53 rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris, FRA

March 5-April 27, 2025

Le Prince: “Il n’y a que l’amour de Silvia qui soit véritablement de l’amour”

Pierre Carlet de Marivaux (1688-1763), one of the so-called “three Ms” of French comedy along with Molière and Alfred de Musset, is best known for his play Le Jeu de l’amour et du hazard (“The Game of Love and Chance”) from 1730. That play has been staged by Pleiades Theatre, Canadian Stage and even the Shaw Festival. His earlier play La Double Inconstance (“The Double Inconstancy”) from 1723 is far more radical and proves that Marivaux, like Molière and Musset, could offer trenchant critiques of society and its ideals couched in the traditional structure of comedy. Théâtre français de Toronto staged the play in 1994, but I have not seen it since then. The production at Lucernaire as directed by Jean-Paul Tribout makes the revolutionary aspect of La Double Inconstance so clear that future productions of the play will likely adopt Tribout’s strategy.

The story concerns a nameless Prince who has fallen in love with the peasant girl Sylvia, whom he has been visiting disguised as an Officer of the Prince. His difficulty is that Sylvia is love with Arlequin and Arlequin with her. To break up the couple, the Prince enlists the help of his smartest servant Flaminia. Her idea is to send her sister Lisette to flirt with Arlequin until he gives up his attraction to Sylvia. When Lisette fails in this task, Flaminia takes it on herself, telling Arlequin that she is irresistibly drawn to him because he looks just her recently deceased lover. Meanwhile, the Prince in the guise of the Officer, plies Sylvia with compliments and images of how easy life at court would be.

As the play’s title suggests, both Arlequin and Sylvia prove inconstant. Flaminia and the Officer, especially once he reveals he is the Prince, succeed in their conquests and the play ends with a double marriage. Multiple marriages are a typical conclusion to comedy, but here they pose uncomfortable questions that are not at all comic.

The first question is how the Prince and Flaminia manage to seduce Sylvia and Arlequin. In large part Sylvia and Arlequin are tempted away from each other with the promise of the material benefits they will receive in life at court. Sylvia admits to Flaminia that she fell in love with Arlequin because he was the best catch in their village. Since then, she has seen how the officer has treated her with a gentleness she has never known before. Meanwhile, Flaminia preys on Arlequin’s essentially good nature with the false tale of his similarity to her deceased brother.

The fact that both the Prince and Flaminia succeed brings up a more radical question of whether there actually is a such a thing a true love. Director Jean-Paul Tribout shows that Arlequin and Sylvia are pretty clearly in lust, but he does make us wonder if they are truly in love. We root for both peasants as long as they hold out against the machinations of the Prince and Flaminia, but Marivaux places us in an increasingly ambiguous position when we see our heroes giving into the schemes of the court characters.

Tribout emphasizes our discomfort by giving Marivaux’s court characters a slight twist. Through Aurore Popineau’s costuming and through Tribout’s direction, Flaminia is presented not as the Prince’s servant but as his equal. Not only that, Tribout’s staging indicates that the Prince and Flaminia are lovers, and Tribout does not change a word of Marivaux’s text to achieve this. Many critics have seen the plot of La Double Inconstanceas anticipating the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos by nearly 50 years with the Prince and Flaminia as precursors to Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil breaking the love between Cécile de Volanges and the Chevalier Danceny.

In Tribout’s production the Prince and Flaminia, while still true to each other, find amusement in winning over the two peasants. Paradoxically, what attracts the Prince and Flaminia to Sylvia and Arlequin is their innocence, the very quality they plan to corrupt. At the very end of the play when the Prince has paired off with Sylvia and Flaminia with Arlequin, Tribout has a pinspot focus on the Prince and Flaminia joining hands as if their upcoming marriages will have no effect on their private relationship.

Implicit in the machinations of the Prince, Flaminia, Lisette and the servant Trivelin is the importance of acting. Sylvia and Arlequin, who are too innocent to feign emotions, are constantly assailed by characters who are playing the roles of lover or helpful advisor. Marivaux highlights this with Lisette, whom her sister attempts to train how to be flirtatious without letting Arlequin be aware of it. As it happens, Lisette is a bad actor and Arlequin spots her ruse immediately. Flaminia is an expert actor and is able to deceive the poor fellow.

Tribout emphasizes Marivaux’s presentation of acting as acting by having Amélie Tribout design a set with mullioned windows that are reflective when lit from the front but transparent when lit from behind. Frequently, Tribout has the court characters gather behind these windows to watch how the acting of the Prince or Flaminia affects the two peasants.

Tribout has assembled a fine ensemble cast. The main standout, perhaps because her character is the most devious, is Marilyne Fontaine as Flaminia. Fontaine exudes insincerity no matter what she says. It all depends on how sophisticated the listener is whether they can detect her tone or not. Innocents like Arlequin cannot. A fellow conspirator like the Prince can hear it and revels in her malice. In a fine scene Fontaine has Flaminia praise the natural beauty of Sylvia even as Flaminia applies makeup to Sylvia’s face to make her blend in with the other women at court.

Thomas Sagols plays Arlequin as a simple, slightly dim young man who, as befits his commedia dell’arte name, is interested in food above all else. In fact, it is food that tempts him most to consider living life at court. Arlequin’s habits are not polished but Sagols shows that Arlequin is a good-hearted soul whose so lacks suspicion he is easily taken in by someone like Flaminia.

Maud Forget is a fireball as Sylvia and speaks with unbelievable rapidity when angry, which lasts from her kidnapping at the start of the play to her meeting with Arlequin. Forget makes Sylvia’s account of how she fell in love with Arlequin very funny by studiously noting all the positive aspects of his character which mostly have to do with his being the only peasant above a dunce in her home village.

Baptiste Bordet as the Prince is handsome and earnest if rather bland. The Prince appreciates the intrigues that Flamina invents but is clearly below her level of creativity. As the Prince’s servant Trivelin, Jean-Paul Tribout, also the director, is a kindly presence. When Trivelin tries to arouse Arlequin’s jealousy by claiming that he too loves Flaminia, we appreciate the aged man’s will to deceive even if the attempt is totally ineffective. Lou Noérie is very funny as Lisette, a young woman so inured to court life that she does have a clue of how to act convincingly as a peasant.

The present production had a run last year and has been brought back because it was so popular. It is easy to see why. Tribout sees that Marivaux’s play has a simple, symmetrical plot, yet he is willing to allow all the play’s uncomfortable overtones to sound out clearly so that we have to readjust our views of what kind of comedy the play is as it develops. Jean Anouilh, who wrote a play La Répétion (1950) in which Marivaux’s play is being rehearsed, called La Double Inconstance “l’histoire élégante et gracieuse d’un crime”. That is exactly how Tribout presents Marivaux’s play and in so doing makes us question all categories that we use to type both genres and people.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Marilyne Fontaine as Flaminia and Baptiste Bordet as the Prince; Emma Gamet as Sylvia and Thomas Sagols as Arlequin; Thomas Sagols as Arlequin and Jean-Paul Tribout as Trivelin. © 2024 Photo Lot.

For tickets visit: www.lucernaire.fr.