PARIS.- Im in shock, a teenage boy sitting near me declared when the lights went up on a recent performance of Molières The Forced Marriage at the Comédie-Française, Frances oldest theater company. It was really sexual, one of his schoolmates told her friends on the way out. Its not the kind of stuff you should show.
Does Molière, the 17th-century comedy master and doyen of French playwrights, really still have the power to surprise? As France celebrates the 400th anniversary of his birth, a flurry of new productions suggests that he can and, equally, that his work can easily feel old-fashioned.
The guilty party isnt Molière. Wildly different takes on his work have been on show in the Paris region. While the Comédie-Française, whose 2022 program is entirely devoted to Molière, has invested in dark, offbeat productions, Molière Month, a yearly theater event run by the city of Versailles, has delivered traditional gowns and breeches, to slightly dull effect.
No one could accuse Louis Arenes version of The Forced Marriage, presented on the Comédie-Françaises Studio stage, of being boring. Sganarelle, the stock central character a deluded man seeking marriage with a much younger woman is practically a Beckettian presence early on, looking puzzled on the plain gray stage and muttering lines from other Molière plays. (You could tell the Molière buffs from the scattered laughs these elicited.)
Arene works hard to inject a contemporary sense of absurdity into what is an average play, first presented in 1664 as a three-act comédie-ballet, a hybrid genre combining spoken dialogue with danced and sung scenes, and streamlined into a one-act work four years later. In this production, all the characters are heavily powdered and wear bald caps as well as prosthetics; the size and form of their fake skulls and visible body padding were among the elements drawing cries of disgust from the adolescents in the audience.
The five-person cast milks it all, turning standard marriage jokes into ominous physical comedy, verging at times on horror fare. (Vomit and severed body parts are involved.) Gender switches among the main roles, an increasingly frequent device on Frances stages, convincingly heighten the weirdness: In addition to Julie Sicard, who is barely recognizable as Sganarelle, Arene has cast Christian Hecq, a bald, 58-year-old character actor, as Dorimène, the young woman Sganarelle seeks to marry.
Hecq doesnt go for cheap laughs; on the contrary, he is serious and quite sensual as Dorimène. While Molières female characters typically resist fiercely when asked to wed suitors they dont like, Dorimène actually isnt against the marriage, seeing an opportunity to get rich and reunite with her lover once Sganarelle is dead. (Ultimately, Sganarelle backs out because he fears being a cuckold.)
Simultaneously, Hecq has been present on the Comédie-Françaises main stage in a very different capacity, as the co-director of a stunning staging of Molières The Bourgeois Gentleman with his partner, Valérie Lesort, in which he stars as Monsieur Jourdain, the would-be gentleman. (It means that on some days, Hecq leaves Dorimène behind at 7:30 p.m., slips into Monsieur Jourdains costume and steps onto a different stage an hour later.)
The Bourgeois Gentleman arguably cements Hecqs place as one of the Comédie-Françaises most category-defying and valuable artists. With his gruff voice, small frame and clownlike gift for physical exaggeration, he could easily have been typecast as a commedia dellarte servant. Yet his emotional range willing to be thoroughly ridiculed one second, the picture of relatable heartbreak the next is evident in his Monsieur Jourdain, the clueless bourgeois who wants nothing more than to be accepted as an aristocrat.
And together with Lesort, he has emerged as part of a duo of stage magicians, deploying old-fashioned tricks and visual imagination. In The Bourgeois Gentleman, that means flying swords, a life-size embroidered elephant and animated goat heads that sway to one of the songs. Since this play also started life as a comédie-ballet, the original score, by Lully, has been revisited here by Mich Ochowiak and Ivica Bogdanic, in a vigorous style inspired by Balkan music. The costumes, by Vanessa Sannino, are luxuriously eccentric: Françoise Gillard, in the role of a marchioness, looks like a fabulous golden beehive.
The Bourgeois Gentleman and The Forced Marriage each steer Molière toward crepuscular absurdity. Like Ivo van Hoves Tartuffe, which opened the Comédie-Françaises Molière extravaganza in January, both productions are mostly designed in shades of gray or black, a departure from the colorful palette that is customary for the playwrights comedies.
This monochromatic approach helps the Comédie-Française orient itself toward the contemporary even as it celebrates its founding father something that does not seem to concern Versailles Molière Month, a likable event founded in 1996. Many of its performances, staged around the town outside Paris where Molière presented a number of his plays to Louis XIV, are free, and feature a mix of professional actors and amateurs.
As a result, the quality varies significantly. A staging of The Impostures of Scapin, directed by Carlo Boso and starring first-year theater students, drew many families with children to a local park on a sunny Sunday afternoon, although the laughs were few and far between. The fact that a number of roles were played in Italian didnt help, although the result was easy enough to follow. The audience reacted more readily to anachronistic jokes like a reference to the film Titanic than to the lines.
That wasnt surprising, since Molières gallery of stock characters, heavily influenced by commedia dellarte, was of its time, despite the social commentary he wove into many plays. The opening production of Molière Month, performed outdoors in a courtyard opposite the palace of Versailles, fared better. The director, Anthony Magnier, opted to stage The Versailles Impromptu, a rarely seen 1663 play that is cheekily autobiographical.
The main character is Molière himself, struggling to put together a show with his reluctant actors. The play was written as a response to his critics, and is difficult to render today, with its parody of a rival companys actors, which presumably had greater resonance in the 17th century.
In a post-show speech, Magnier said the cast had rehearsed the show in just nine days, and it acquitted itself well, with Elisa Benizio a highlight. The Versailles Impromptu allowed the text to take center stage, with period costumes and next to no props and sets, yet the play itself didnt feel especially enlightening or satisfying.
On the other hand, when Molière is treated merely as the canvas for a directors vision, as in some of the Comédie-Françaises productions this year, the inner logic and wit of his dialogue dont always survive. Does it matter? Perhaps Molières true triumph is that four centuries on, his work remains malleable enough to appeal to radically different crowds.
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Directed by Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort. Comédie-Française, through July 21.
Le Mariage Forcé
Directed by Louis Arene. Comédie-Française, through July 3.
Mois Molière
Versailles, various venues through June 30.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.