A Moliere Museum: Long Wharf Theatre's The Bungler

The Long Wharf Theater advertised this fall 2000 production as "A North American Premiere over 300 Years in the Making"--a clever tag line for a truly unusual theatrical event. Their staging of The Bungler represents this continent's first live glimpse at an all-but-forgotten early work of Molière, in a brand-new English version by legendary translator Richard Wilbur. Long Wharf's artistic director Doug Hughes (who also directed this production) deserves a great big "Merci!" for daring to think outside the established patterns of not-for-profit season planning. New translations of foreign-language plays have been far too scarce on our stages. By rescuing The Bungler from dusty library shelves and giving it dramatic life in America, Hughes, Wilbur, and the Long Wharf have given audiences a sizable gift--one that helps expand our understanding of the French theater's most celebrated neoclassical comedian. That beats your average regional offering, sans doute.

The English-speaking world's neglect of The Bungler is most curious, given the mountains of Molière scholarship and the important role this work played in the French playwright's life. Staged in Lyon in 1655 and two years later in Paris, the comedy is Molière's first full-length work. Its success in the provinces brought the playwright's "Illustrious Theater Company" back to the French capital, from where they had fled twelve years earlier in bankruptcy. The Bungler was Molière's first foothold in his climb toward the summit of royal favor and Parisian celebrity; and it remained a staple of the repertoire and a favorite acting vehicle for Molière himself and French performers following him. The script-- composed as the playwright and his troupe lived and worked among the itinerant Italian companies in the French countryside--displays a fresh, direct imprint of commedia dell'arte on Molière's drama. But four centuries of English speakers have had almost no exposure to the work, save for John Dryden's very freely adapted Sir Martin Mar-All of 1667, popular in seventeenth-century London, but hardly an enduring favorite from the Restoration. No new English version of The Bungler has been published in more than a century.

Luckily for us (and also for Molière), we have Richard Wilbur to help reintroduce The Bungler. Wilbur has revolutionized Molière in English with his versions of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives, and others. The ease with which he converts the French Alexandrine into English iambic pentameter, and the creativity and verbal dexterity with which he makes his couplets rhyme, help make Molière's texts alive and playable in our tongue; this latest translation is no exception. Wilbur's rendering of The Bungler masterfully captures Molière's poetry and comic spirit. Still, the translation cannot mask this forgotten script's deficiencies compared to Molière's more familiar plays. It lacks the harsh, unrelenting social satire that darkens and complicates the comedy of Tartuffe and The Misanthrope.

In The Bungler, hapless young lad, Lelie is having one of those lives in which nothing seems to go right. He swoons for a beautiful young Gypsy slave named Celie and turns to his crafty servant Mascarille to figure out how to unite him with his beloved:

I'd be foolish to despair or doubt;
With your help, I feel sure of winning out.
You're full of clever schemes; your canny wit
Finds no predicament too much for it.

The conniving Mascarille repeatedly hatches plots that should swipe Celie from under the watchful eye of her master, Trufaldin. But every scheme Mascarille cunningly sets in motion, Lelie unknowingly messes up, ruining his own prospects. Mascarille fumes in frustration with each of his master's missteps, but also revels in the challenge of outsmarting Lelie's monumental ineptitude:

It might be said (and I might well attest)
That a meddling imp by which he...