Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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by Molière, adapted by Richard Bean, directed by Antoni Cimolino
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 18-October 14, 2016
Béralde: “With friends like this, who needs enemas?”
From the Stratford Festival’s current production of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, adapted as The Hypochondriac by Richard Bean, you really would have no idea why Molière is one of the world’s greatest writers of comedy and why this is one of his greatest works. Like some pre-adolescent schoolboy, Bean can’t get over the fact that 17th-century medicine involved enemas and urine examination and so he ramps up the scatological humour so much that Molière’s great study of mental delusion becomes a gross-out farce where all the punchlines end in urine or faeces. To compound the problem director Antoni Cimolino tries to present the production in the mode of the “original practices” fad, as in Tim Carroll’s Twelfth Night of 2012, for which purpose there could hardly be a worse choice of adaptation than Bean’s.
As in Carroll’s Twelfth Night, when you enter the auditorium you find the actors in 17th-century costumes preparing for the show. There is dancing to a trio of musicians, acrobatics, juggling, people running about with scripts and bits of costumes. This terribly overused directorial trope of happening upon the cast as they prepare on stage (as if they didn’t know the audience was arriving) leads us to think, given all the dancers, singers and musicians, that Cimolino will be staging Le Malade imaginaire in its original form. The play was written as a comédie-ballet, one of the theatrical hybrids beloved of the French court, in which the play was preceded by a sung ballet, with sung balletic interludes between the acts and a long sung ballet for its conclusion. The music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), composer of the opera Médée (1693), is extant and has been recorded. Cimolino even goes so far as to stage the play as if it were one of the original performances in 1673 in the presence of King Louis XIV (Sanjay Talwar), who does not appear in Bean’s adaptation.
It is therefore extraordinarily perverse that of all the possible translations and adaptations, Cimolino has chosen the 2005 adaptation by Richard Bean which deliberately excises all the ballet interludes including the most important one – the celebration of Argan, the title character, becoming a doctor. Why cross-cast this play with A Chorus Line, if you are not going to use all the song and dance talent available to you? As Bean states in his Note to the adaptation, “I have cut the Prologue, Interludes, any ballet, and also provided my own Epilogue. So any students of Molière would be advised to look at the original or a faithful translation”. I would add that this Note applies not just to “students of Molière” but anyone attending a classic theatre festival hoping to see Molière’s play in a form that even remotely captures Molière’s style or what the play is about.
Anyone who knows the play will find Bean’s adaptation absolutely infuriating. Bean is one of those megalomaniac playwrights who in adapting a comedy feels free to substitute their own jokes and routines for those in the original as if their humour were equal to or better than the original’s. Unlike Molière’s original, Bean’s humour revolves almost entirely around pee and poo. Molière’s play does not have the Argan constantly examining and commenting on the contents of his chamber pot. It does not have scenes of Argan suddenly feeling the urgency to void. It does not have a scene of Argan having to drink a jar of his own urine. And it definitely does not have a scene where a doctor gives Argan an enema on stage while fighting with Béralde so that the enema nozzle goes in and out of Argan’s backside as if he were undergoing anal sex. Nor does it have a scene where Argan as doctor cuts open a live woman and pulls out her intestines and then her lungs.
Molière’s play is about the mind whereas Bean’s adaptation is all about the gastrointestinal tract and its contents. Argan of Le Malade imaginaire is the last in a long line of monomaniacs in Molière’s plays – Arnolphe in L’École des femmes (1662) obsessed with female unfaithfulness, Orgon of Le Tartuffe (1664) with religious piety, Alceste of Le Misanthrope (1666) with his negative view of society, or Harpagon of L’Avare (1668) with money. In all these cases Molière is interested in the psychology of the central character and how his narrow view of the world harms both himself and those around him. At the end of Le Misanthrope and L’Avare, the main character has so excluded himself from the world that the comedy comes very close to tragedy. That is one of many reasons Molière’s plays are so great in demonstrating how close comedy and tragedy really are.
In Le Malade imaginaire Molière takes a different tack, one he had used previously in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), of taking a central character possessed of an absurd folly, gradually exposing how that folly becomes more dangerous and concluding the play with a heavily ironic celebration of that folly that leaves the central character ecstatic but deluded. It is, of course, a moot point whether leaving the central character in a state of delusion is actually comic or tragic.
Bean’s adaptation also misrepresents the political aspect of Molière’s plays. The monomaniacs he studies are also petty tyrants who, usually with the help of the lower class (i.e., the servants), are overthrown. This is emphatically the case in Le Malade imaginaire, but Bean keeps adding passages praising Louis XIV, like the maid’s long éloge in Act 2, that don’t exist in the original. I assume that Bean as a Brit is trying to paint the French as toadies to their king, but he seems to forget that a play like Le Tartuffe had been banned only nine years before this play.
The best that can be said for Bean’s adaptation is that he does at least keep the bare bones of Molière’s plot. Argan (Stephen Ouimette), who has devoted his life to being ill, wants his daughter Angélique (Shannon Taylor) to marry the dunce Thomas (Ian Lake) who is studying to be a doctor. That way Argan will have a doctor ready to hand for nothing. Angélique, however, has already fallen in love with Cléante (Luke Humphrey), one of the workers in Argan’s carpet underlay factory. If Angélique does not marry Thomas, Argan threatens to send her to a nunnery. This is just what Argan’s gold-digging wife of 18 months Béline (Trish Lindström) wants. She married Argan, as she did her previous six husbands, hoping he would die and leave her his money. If Angélique marries Thomas, Béline will inherit nothing.
Cimolino has a well-chosen cast for Le Malade imaginaire, but they are wasted in an adaptation that turns them all into cartoons rather than characters. Stephen Ouimette makes a wonderful Argan. His perpetual look of worry that can easily slide into suspicion or meekness is perfect for the role. His mastery of comic timing makes every word count even when these words mostly have to do with bodily functions. He is especially good at showing that Argan is as vigorous as anyone when moved by anger or lust, but suddenly remembers that such vigour is not in keeping with his view of himself as sickly. One of the two best moments in the play is the one serious speech that Bean allows Argan when Argan realizes with the real pain of betrayal that Béline has never loved him.
Brigit Wilson is very good as Argan’s wily, loud-mouthed maid who sees through every ruse that everyone is playing. Wilson has a rapport with Ouimette so that we can understand that Toinette stays with Argan because underneath their constant bickering she really does care for his well-being and wants to shake him out of his self-delusion. The long speech that Bean gives Toinette in praise of Louis XIV does not work because it is so completely out of character.
Trish Lindström is very funny as Béline, who is completely unable to disguise her mercenary designs on Argan. It’s too bad that Bean underscores this so much because an actor like Lindström can get that meaning across without constant iteration.
Following his infantile sense of humour, Bean decides to change the name of Angélique’s suitor from Thomas Diafoirus to Thomas Diafoirerrhoea (geddit?). Peter Hutt amuses as Thomas’s doting father who is completely blind to his son’s ineptitude, though it is actually funnier when the father is exasperated by it as everyone else. Ian Lake, unrecognizable in a tall two-horned wig and too much makeup, does not quite have a handle on what makes Thomas so funny, but then Bean has given him no help. Thomas is supposed to be such a scholar that he has no interpersonal skills, but since Bean has removed all of Thomas’s Latin remarks this aspect is not clear. Thus Thomas’s transition from memorized speeches to a learned disquisition seems a contradiction rather than an extension of his personality.
Ben Carlson is an ideal raisonneur as Béralde. He lays out the nature of Argan’s folly in the clearest possible way. It’s just too bad that Bean thinks he needs to interrupt this important conversation with an onstage enema which, of course, makes us forget everything Béralde has said.
To finish off his manhandling of Molière’s text, Bean decides to excise Molière’s epilogue which for many is the apotheosis of the comedy. In the original students disguised as doctors celebrate Argan’s becoming one of them in a ceremony full of Latinate gibberish. Bean includes some of this but does not allow the ceremony to rise to the heights of pure absurdity that Molière envisions which looks back to Aristophanes and forward to the Theatre of the Absurd. Instead, Bean remembers that Molière died during the fourth performance of the play on February 17, 1673. He therefore has the actor playing Argan die. This might be effective if Bean had established somewhere that we were watching Molière’s company and that Argan was being played by Molière himself, but he does not. (You discover this only by reading the programme.) The death is therefore meaningless and feels tacked on since it marks too abrupt a shift from the realm of poop jokes to heavy irony.
People who are interested in seeing The Hypocrite because they love Molière should be warned that they will not be seeing a play filled with Molière’s wit so much as a version dumbed down to Richard Bean’s puerile sense of humour. What one feels most is that the show has been a terrible waste. It is a waste of the talent of all the available singers and dancers who could have been used to present the play in its original form as a comédie-ballet. And it is a waste of an excellent cast who could have put on a superlative performance of the play if only Cimolino had chosen a superlative version for them to perform.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Stephen Ouimette as Argan and Brigit Wilson as Toinette;Ben Carlson as Béralde, John Kirkpatrick as an Assistant, Rylan Wilkie as Monsieur Fleurant, Stephen Ouimette as Argan and Jamie Mac as an Assistant; Trish Lindström as Béline. ©2016 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2016-08-19
The Hypochondriac