Contemporary Arts
Misanthrope
LE CHIEN DU JARDINIER. By Georges Neveux after Lope de Vega.—LE MISANTHROPE.
By Jean-Baptiste Poquelin-Moliere. (Palace.) I Am not going to talk too much about the first Barrault evening at the Palace. The Lope de Vega piece is a pleasant enough exercise in the commedia dell'arte manner, but it is a manner which can be seen almost anywhere done with moderate competence—which was how it was done here. M. Barrault and his company have won their fame from other types of play. Afterwards there was a series of readings from French poems and a piece of mime by M, Barrault himself, all of which was enjoyable and rather unlike anything that is at present to be seen on the English stage. France, I imagine, is one of the few countries where poetry is still spoken aloud for pleasure in public places—mostly, it is true, verse of the Prevert semi-cabaret variety. The choice of poems the other evening was unexpected, modern and effective. I was particularly pleased to see Robert Desnos included in it.
But the main thing was the Misanthrope— that majestic monument to the folly and knavery of a highly civilised society. Inciden- tally, anyone who feels that Moliere was writing a criticism of Alceste rather than one of the foils around him should read Saint- Simon, where the bitterness is as great and illustrated from history. Unfortunately M. Barrault's production weights the scales quite unduly and, in so doing, distorts the play. Alceste is a tragic figure, but M. Barrault makes of him an irascible eccentric. Celimene is a high-class whore. Mlle. Madeleine Renaud makes of her a woman of the world very patient with the foibles of her erratic lover. The result is that Alceste loses immensely in stature and the whole tension of the play is relaxed. Even the intensity of 'Faut-il que je vous aime?' is lost, and the effect of Alceste's final denunciation of the world just before the curtain dies away in a stutter of bathos. I should accuse M. Barrault of having taken advantage of the ambivalence which certainly hangs over Le Misanthrope, the opposition between his rigour and the loose common sense of the homme moyen sensuel, to deform a great work of art. He is a fine producer and actor, but I think there are limits to what any interpretation should do to a classic. Those limits are originally imposed by the author's intentions; to ignore them is a betrayal. After this initial mistake no amount of good acting in the smaller parts, no amount of incidental beauties, can atone.
The reason for this seems to me to be fairly clear. M. Barrault's theatre is essentially modern. Of all the plays I have seen him in those I have liked have been twentieth-century works, but I will return to this point with Christophe Colomb next week.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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