le misanthrope

This afternoon we went to see Molière's "Le Misanthrope" at the Comédie Française. The main action of the play focuses on Alceste, who entirely rejects all the social niceties and proper courtly politeness in favor of a far more honest and sincere approach to his interaction with others. This makes him incredibly unpopular with the other members of the court. While holding on to and fiercely demonstrating these values, Alceste is also in love with Célimène, a woman of the court who cares enormously about her social reputation. I found the play, when reading it over the past two weeks, to be rather comedic; even the ending (spoiler!) was funny, in my opinion. After everything that has happened and Célimène is exposed as a gossipy social climber who actually despises most everyone, she still refuses Alceste, telling him that she is unwilling to go off into the wilderness with him to live away from silly court life.

I liked the play when I read it, but I couldn't stand the way that the play was performed today. It was SO OVERDRAMATIC and such a true TRAGEDY. I couldn't believe it. I think they were trying a new, modern approach. They added quite a lot of sex to the play, which is completely nonexistent in the text, and they really overdid, in my opinion, the onstage laughter. It was used so often that it seemed almost maniacal, and in the end, the actors had laughed much more than the audience had. That definitely didn't seem right to me, especially since I found the play pretty clever and funny when reading it, and not at all while viewing it. Also, in writing the play is rather flat in terms of onstage movement. There are very few stage directions, and most of the situations are simply two characters having a conversation. In this production, though, the characters were blustering around as if there were a time limit on standing in one place. They were constantly flipping their coattails and running to and from different corners of the stage. It was pretty distracting.

It was rather hard to follow the French. If we hadn't read it in class last week, I wouldn't have been able to follow the play at all. Mostly I think it's because the actors' tones changed so drastically in the performance; from yelling to sobbing to laughing to whispering. It made the already very rapid French speech even more difficult to comprehend.

Anyways, good play, not my fave production, beautiful building for the Comédie Française. We weren't allowed to take any photos, but it was very beautiful, I promise.