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by Molière, adapted by Martin Crimp,

directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

January 5-February 6, 2011

If you go to the Tarragon hoping to see Molière’s comic masterpiece The Misanthrope (1666), please note the words “Adapted by Martin Crimp.”  “Adapted” does not mean “newly translated.”  British playwright Crimp basically wrote an entirely new play in 1996 inspired by Molière’s but set in the London of 15 years ago among film stars, playwrights and journalists.  Though written in rhyming couplets like the original, the play’s content is so altered that the jokes and preoccupations are Crimp’s, not Molière’s.

The only name Crimp keeps from Molière is that of the title character Alceste (Stuart Hughes), a man who reacts against the hypocrisy of society by always speaking the truth.  The Tarragon production begins well as the explosions of rage of Hughes’s intense Alceste are countered by the calm reason of his best friend John (Patrick Galligan, ideally cast as the raisonneur figure).  Alceste’s views of society are immediately embodies in the form of fawning theatre critic Covington (David Storch in the show’s funniest performance).  Crimp’s play and director Richard Rose’s production suddenly collapse with the introduction of woman Alceste loves, Jennifer (“Célimène” in Molière) played by Andrea Runge.  In Molière, she is meant to be a parallel figure to Alceste, as quick and sharp as he is to flay all those around her. The difference is that she plays society’s game and criticizes people behind their backs, not to their face.  Crimp re-imagines the character as a promiscuous newly-famous, barely-twenty Hollywood starlet and Rose directs Runge as airheaded Valley Girl.  The problem is that this approach hardly accords with the polysyllabic declamations Crimp gives her nor with the real love she professes for Alceste.  It would help if Runge could match Hughes in stage presence, but she does not and is the only cast member who speaks Crimp’s verse as prose.

In Crimp’s version the play becomes a familiar condemnation of the fatuousness of stardom, the ruthlessness of the tabloid press and the commodification of sex when it should be about the difficulty of maintaining personal integrity in a corrupt world.  In 2009 the red light district’s youthful zero-budget production of a straightforward translation, got this point and used insightful direction and inventive design to make Molière’s play more relevant and involving than this production of Crimp’s self-consciously clever update that seems oh-so-last-century.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-01-06.

Photo: Michelle Giroux, Brandon McGibbon, Andrea Runge, Stuart Hughes, Julian Richings, and Patrick Galligan. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.