Kenneth Hurren on Jane Eyre's entrancing sister
I can't say I was expecting much of the National Theatre's production of Moliere's The Misanthrope beyond some determinedly respectful hands-across-the-Channel tribute, well-meaning but embarrassing, to the patron saint of Coe Comedie Francaise to mark the tercentenary of the great man's death. The way things turned out at the Old Vic last week, I think a few Legion d'Honneur awards are in order.
The trouble with Moliere, to take an insular and disgustingly British view, is that whenever he had anything of solemn consequence to say he was apt to rely upon a mode of expression that has no precise counterpart in English letters: that is to say, upon rhymed couplets that are at once both heroic and comic. It has placed his translators in a singular difficulty. Attempts to render the happy grace of his complex style into some equivalent English have inevitably dismayed readers and auditors of sensibility, the currency of the form having been devalued for us by its long and facetious association with Victorian pantomime, and though prose versions have had their fragmentary charms, they have not been especially helpful to an understanding of Moliere's pre-eminence in the annals of French drama. What we have had has been a turning of wine into water, whereas what is actually required is a turning of one wine into another quite different wine, equally palatable and equally intoxicating,
in which, while the flavour might conceivably be changed, the bouquet would be retained. This sort of transmutation clearly requires at least a small miracle, and I had not, until Tony Harrison's version of The Misanthrope came along, believed in such things.
Harrison offers his work with a casual modesty, remarking in his introduction to the published text (Rex Collings, paperback Cl) that the kinship between his version and the original was most aptly summarised by his six-year-old son: " I know that Moliere," the little fellow said, " she's Jane Eyre's sister." The diffidence is a touch excessive (' she ' is a most entrancing sister), but I take the point, which is a simple recognition of the inevitable, that a change of language involves a change of character ;1 not of essence. There is also, as you would doubtless expect, a change of metre: the abandonment of the six iambics of the Moliere line (natural and usual in French, but as awkward in English as, well, an extra foot) in favour of our own conventional pentameters.
The touch of genius in Harrison's approach — it is hard to believe it merely a happy accident — is the perception that showed him the paradox that he could get closer to Moliere by seeming to move away from him, by pulling forward the action across three centuries from 1666 to 1966, and into a milieu in which his own verse and wit are most comfortably at home. Evidently he found inspiring support for this move in Andre Ribaud's satirical pieces for Le Canard Enchain& impishly predicated on an analogy between the era of Louis XIV and that of General de Gaulle, which Harrison pursues enthusiastically. In this setting, with Celimene's house in Paris a salon for the jet-set (pictorially realised with impeccable elegance by Tanya Moiseiwitsch), their conversation peppered with modern-day allusions, the couplets attain a driving, muscular tension, pacing the dramatic narrative, as well as affording thz.‘ simpler satisfactions to be derived from the sweet consonance and exact employment of words.
It is a modernisation that does no injury at all to the theme of the play, of course. The social whirl evidently hasn't changed much these three hundred years, and the drawing-rooms where the leisured classes
and theatricals and litterateurs and other such persons of boundless sophistication might be gathered today have a disconcertingly recognisable affinity with the salons that Moliere regarded so caustically and sardonically. If we cannot take altogether so severe a view of their fawning hypocrisies — which might seem of ten to be no more than ordinary civilities — it is a measure, I suppose, of our inurement to it all, and of the failure of men like Alceste to compel acceptance of their own lofty standards of morality, truth and sincerity. This, too, would have
been no great surprise to Moliere, who held an extraordinarily steady balance between virtue and vice, mocking his hero, the righteous but humourless Alceste, a great man for moral absolutes, as percipiently as he did the frivolously corrupt society he railed against.
The man is often played with a puritan gravity, but I doubt the appropriateness of that conception in the present context, and I was greatly taken with Alec McCowen's interpretation of him as an indignant wasp: he may be inclind, 'here and there, to overdo the peaks of his exasperation, not to mention the exasperation of his piques, but on the whole it is a formidable performance, atrabilious, anguished, and funny in his despair of the society crowd and in his ambivalent passion for Celimene, the girl who embodies so perversely their shams and vanities and almost everything else he deplores. Moliere mocks him, not, of course, for his principles, nor even for his intransigence, but for his ridiculous conceit in supposing that he is capable of changing the innate imperfections of human nature.
Harrison (or, perhaps, the director, John Dexter) is ultimately a little gentler than Moliere with Celimene, which seems suitable. The minx is played with dazzling aplomb and bewitching subtlety by Diana Rigg, all bubble curls and pretty pouts and necklines cut down to here, pointing the wit of her every lime as effectively as she takes her final moment of desolation. Alan MacNaughtan as the mouthpiece of moderation C' Moderation's where true wisdom lies/What we should be is
reasonably wise "), Jeanne Watts as a remarkably placid member of the excitable
circle, and Gawn Grainger as a seedy poetaster, give added pleasure, and I should not have thought there could be any valid complaints about the whole show. The Guardian man, though, seemed rather put out, declaring darkly that it was
typical of the National Theatre's lack of " any sustained social vision" and that "an uncompromising, disturbing leftwing play [is] given a pleasing, decorative bourgeois production." I do not think•
we can do anyCning but sigh resignedly in the face of this sort of thing. The chances are I ought to be shot, but to tell the truth a production that is pleasing and decorative, whether bourgeois or not, seems to me an agreeable asset to the town's stages, and it these splendid virtues were to be imposed or. an uncompromising, disturbing left-wing play, they might well seem even more splendid and virtuous. I doubt. though, whether The Misanthrope could be precisely so described, except, perhaps, by a born Alceste.
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