Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✩✩✩
by Molière, directed by Jean-Stéphane Roy
Théâtre français de Toronto,
Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
October 26-November 10, 2007
Those who enjoyed the Théâtre français de Toronto excellent production of Molière’s George Dandin earlier this year will be disappointed with its staging of one of Molière’s greatest comedies, Le Misanthrope (1666). Director Jean-Stéphane Roy has lots of ideas about what to do to the play, but they seldom aid in making the text clearer or more effective. Indeed, it is very hard to see the play for the multitude of Roy’s gimmickry.
The story is one of the least conventionally comic in Molière’s canon. Alceste (Julian Doucet), the misanthrope of the title, is fed up with the hypocrisy and triviality of mankind. All that prevents him from exiling himself from human society is his love for Célimène (Karine Ricard), a materialistic, flirtatious young woman. Like a tragic hero Alceste’s one redeeming feature, his love, is also is tragic flaw, since Célimène is clearly not the person he thinks she is.
One thing that makes Molière’s comedies great is their close relation to tragedy. Guillaume Bernardi masterfully brought this out in George Dandin. Roy, however, falls into the trap of so many directors of classic comedy in thinking the play has to be goosed up to make it funnier and more relevant. The time is the present but a nameless character (Éric Charbonneau), dressed to look like Molière, is constantly on stage, announcing the act and scene numbers, aping characters’ habits and acting out what characters say. He also is in charge of a live video camera that projects onto a screen at the back. Used discreetly this device could underscore Molière’s theme of society’s elevation of image over substance. Used indiscriminately as here, it, like everything else this character does, becomes a distraction.
Roy pushes the circle of male admirers around Célimène from comic portraits into garish cartoons. Roy interrupts speeches with bouts of disco music. Worst of all, Roy allows the actors to speak Molière’s verse as if it were prose. This blight afflicts many modern productions of Shakespeare but it’s sad to see this take hold in French theatre. Much of Molière’s wit lies in his use of rhyming couplets to raise and then overturn expectations. When spoken rapid fire, with no sense of line or even sentence breaks, that wit is lost.
Doucet and Ricard, alone among the cast, are able to convey some sense of poetry in their lines and some sense of complexity in their characters. Doucet gives an impressive, brooding performance that communicates both the strength and fragility of Alceste’s absolutism. Ricard shows that Célimène is smarter than everyone around her but loves society for the very reasons Alceste despises it. It’s no surprise that the three most effective scenes in the play are ones that Roy allows to be played straight without mucking them up. When you see the complexity of Alceste and Célimène’s interaction in Act 5, his hopelessness and her pity, you are finally drawn in and know how much more impact the production could have had if Roy had set aside sonic and visual distractions to focus on the text.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-10-29.
Photo: Gisèle Rousseau and Julian Doucet. ©Nir Bareket.
2007-10-29
Le Misanthrope