The Misanthrope - Moliere, in a new version by Martin Crimp

Dublin, Gate Theatre
February 6 - March 15

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Moliere/Crimp

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    Martin Crimp’s rewrite of Moliere’s satirical farce is very clever indeed. It is a self-reflexive postmodernist deconstruction of the processes of representation in the age of apathetic social hypocrisy. Set in the late twentieth century, the action takes place in a world where the relativity of social, moral, and critical values has become a matter of general indifference. In this environment, all attempts at finding truth (or even having a position on its value) seem utterly meaningless. Crimp casts Moliere’s seemingly immortal curmudgeon Alceste into this soulless morass and lets him rip with all the force and fury of the original text. Retaining the original verse style but shifting the language to the contemporary, expletive-laden vernacular, Crimp continually draws attention to the linguistic and narrative structures underlying the central character’s search for truth and his need to express himself clearly on the subject.
    The elusive truths sought in Moliere’s text mostly revolve around Alceste’s quest to find out whether or not he is truly loved by the beautiful Celimene, an eligible young socialite whose personal views are often shielded by the gentle flattery expected in her social circle. The quest to know the truth involves much evasion and confrontation in which Alceste’s blunt ‘honesty’ alienates those around him.
    Crimp transports the action from seventeenth century France to contemporary London, where Alceste is now a writer moving in the circles of the glitterati of the theatre and movie business. The object of his affections is a bright young American actress whose flirtations are no longer with the aristocracy, but with press, agents, actors, and acting coaches. All of the scenes take place in Jennifer’s hotel bedroom, a stylized leather and linen black and white postmodern nightmare lit so harshly that every tremor in the actors’ gestures is visible throughout the theatre.
    The play places the classical and the contemporary in a dialectical relationship with one another. It is so self-consciously deconstructive (complete with explicit references to Derrida, Barthes, postmodernism, and even to the conventions of seventeenth century French theatre) that it leaves the critical mind with nowhere to turn, prompting feelings of intellectual frustration which generate sympathy for its central character. This acts as a type of formal critique which ultimately reflects back not only on the play itself, but upon the equivalent social, moral, and political values which were the target of much of Moliere’s invective. Whatever about the class-based hypocrisies of Moliere’s France, how can one make oneself heard clearly in a society where it does not even matter if you succeed in doing so, where every utterance is subject to processes of analysis and criticism that make ‘meaning’ vanish in a cloud of ‘isms’?
    This conception of the play as self-critique is a clever one, and it is intellectually engaging even though Crimp does not quite overcome some of the challenges he has set for himself in terms of characterization and gender politics. The play is an inevitable victim of its own cleverness however. First staged in London in 1996 (330 years after the original), it requires precision in performance and direction to overcome some of its deficiencies. One problem is the lack of physical expressiveness necessary to create the impression of the contemporary, something which is in direct opposition with the classical necessity to give physical and gestural direction through the idiosyncrasies of dialogue. Moliere, it should be remembered, was an actor as well as a writer, and knew well that larger than life characters required expansive movements to give them physical balance. There is surprisingly little physical force in Crimp’s version, and given that the actors in this current production seem uncomfortable with the verse dialogue, there is a sense of diagetic unease which undermines the play on the whole.
    The biggest problem with the production is that it is difficult to become particularly involved with these characters and their world. It is a thought-provoking piece of work and has been staged with evident care, but it is not especially funny. The Misanthrope is meant to be comical; a subversive, fractured take on human inanity which confronts us with our own foolish assumptions. There is altogether too much visible effort here on the part of both the cast and director to handle the delicate balance of elements in Crimp’s revision of Moliere. The result is that it is a cold, solely intellectually stimulating experience which ultimately does not have sufficient virility to shock the audience into laughing at its own absurdity.
    In performance terms, Nick Dunning (Henry IV) works hard to suggest Alceste’s righteous indignation and to build up to his outpourings of fury without losing his grip on the character’s essential rationality. He does his best, but like most of his co-stars, he fails to balance the enunciative dimensions of contemporary English and stylized rhyming. Elisabeth Dermot Walsh (Two Plays After) is a physically striking Jennifer, but the paradoxes in her character require a performance of greater magnitude to resolve satisfactorily. By the end the audience is not likely to be entirely convinced that any decision she has made can be judged on any but the most arbitrary of value systems, which in a sense defeats the purpose of the play (if indeed its purpose is to ‘place’ Alceste’s anger in this social system. If it isn’t, then what is the point of the play at all?). The usually reliable David Pearse (Alone it Stands) is also clearly uncomfortable on stage. Though he alone tries to inject a note of physical characterization in what is otherwise much too static a production, he merely seems awkward instead of polemically comical. Susan Fitzgerald (Blithe Spirit) injects the right note of venom into her characterization of the bitchy acting coach Marcia, making hers probably the most effective turn.