Snap
Ir theatres, like cinemas, displayed a series of stills outside the box-office, the Comedic Francaise for their production of Tartuffe would have about five to choose from. Their playing proceeds by a series of orderly climaxes; the stage-grouping is held for a second, then disperses. Thus when the lovers, Marianne and Valere, quarrel, they move apart from each other almost measuring their steps, as though the movements of the one must exactly correspond to those of the other. When Dorine intervenes to bring them together again, their approach is just as deliberate. They advance and retreat till finally Dorinc takes a hand of each of them, joins them centre stage, and the episode is over. Such balanced grouping is apparent throughout so that it becomes almost a symbol of the forces in the play. The opponents of Tartuffe have their corner stage right, Orgon in the centre and Tartuffe stage left. The progress of the play is the winning of Orgon back to his family group and the isolation of Tartuffe.
It can be argued, of course, that Torinfle demands such a style, that the play is no more than a number of incidents illustrating Orgon's gullibility. In this way much of the dialogue is incidental, serving only to lead up to the vignette of Orgon finally looking out from under the table to find Tartuffe seducing his wife. Certainly this is the way the Comedie Francaise played it. But it was not the Tartufle I thought I knew. Looking at it from the angle of how I thought a modern would produce it, I had imagined Tartuffe himself as a far more plausible rogue, whose professions of religion were quite as much twisted as false. This was a modern reading, and I see now an entirely wrong one. For everything in the Comedic Francaise production is closely based on the text. Tartuffe is simply gross, not merely in what he says or in what we hear about him from other people but in his very appearance. He walks around the stage like an enormous, slightly soggy balloon. When he confesses his unworthiness to Orgon in making advances to his wife, we almost visibly see him deflate. He is excellently played by Louis Seigner. All this makes for a very much duller play, but one that must be as faithful as possible to the author's intentions.
Having reduced one play to size, the Company magically blew another one up, and by using exactly the same methods. Feydeau's Un Fa 0 la Patte is simply the tale of a man trying to escape from his mistress in order to marry an innocent. But the mistress is loth to let him go and there are endless complications. The players go at the stock farce with quite as much deliberation as they do Tartufle. Again there are formal group- ings and snapshot poses, as if the actors were saying not `this is me playing a character,' but `this is me giving a perfect but rather enlarged imitation of a character, and watch what happens when we all do imitations together.' If anything, Un HI was rather underplayed. Not a single situation was overdone, not a single action was unnecessarily repeated, so that, what is entirely rare in farce, one actually wanted more. Even the incredible physical contortions of Robert Hirsch as the crippled old lover and ballad-monger were contained within the order of the whole.
MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
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