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by Sabina Berman, translated by Shelley Tepperman, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

December 3-28, 2008

Molière is a major disappointment.  The Tarragon seldom stages large-scale costume dramas and it is sad to see so much expense lavished on a play not worth the effort.  While we must laud the Tarragon for bringing us a play from Mexico for a change, this is not one of Sabina Berman’s best works.  The play from 1999 is like a pallid imitation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979), with comic playwright Molière substituted for Mozart, tragedian Jean Racine acting as Salieri and narrator and King Louis XIV standing in for Emperor Joseph II.  Berman would like her play to represent the confrontation of the comic and tragic world-views, but her insight is so superficial and her disregard for history so great that the play tells us nothing significant about the playwrights or her theme.

Berman imagines Molière (Richard McMillan) and his former pupil Racine (Rick Roberts) as great rivals, so much so that the Archbishop of Paris (Julian Richings) bets that if Molière were deprived of his personal happiness he could no longer write comedy.  Berman’s fiction is undermined by the fact that in reality Racine’s prime rival was Pierre Corneille, another tragedian.  Berman’s Racine claims he wants to bring the reality of tragedy to France, whereas, as any French schoolchild knows, Corneille had already done that with Le Cid in 1637 two years before Racine was born.  Needless to say, Berman omits Corneille as a character.  She also omits to mention that Molière’s troupe staged tragedies, including Racine’s, and that Racine wrote a comedy, Les Plaideurs (1668), still staged today.  As for her theme, Berman imagines comedy simplistically as laughter and tragedy as sadness.  This view ignores the exaltation or catharsis tragedy can produce as well as the often-noted fact of how close to tragedy Molière’s greatest comedies come.  Tartuffe (1664), for one, needs a deus ex machina, a tragic device, to effect a comic ending.

Fine performances might save the production, but Roberts is woefully miscast as Racine, unable to conjure up either the gravitas or slyness his character should have.  McMillan’s acting is all over the place, presenting Molière as so  puerile and emotionally overwrought it’s impossible to imagine him sitting down to write five-act plays in verse.  Of the eleven other cast members, Kyle Horton’s work as Louis XIV is a pleasure as is Nancy Palk’s as Molière’s level-headed consort Madeleine and Mike Ross’s live period music as Lully.  Yet, too often director Richard Rose encourages the cast to overplay their roles which only defeats the purpose.  Now that the Tarragon has Charlotte Dean’s lovely sets and period costumes, Rose should consider mounting a more profound work about Molière like Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Cabal of Hypocrites (1929), whose focus on religious censorship is still painfully relevant.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-12-04.

Photo: Richard McMillan as Molière and Rick Roberts as Racine. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.