Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (review)

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. By Molière. La Comédie Française (Salle Richelieu), Paris. 19 December 2000.

The centerpiece at the Comédie Française this past season was Jean-Louis Benoit's production of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the acknowledged masterpiece of that "total theatre" genre of the seventeenth-century, the comédie-ballet. A forerunner of the modern musical comedy, but quickly supplanted by the Lully/Quinault operatic repertoire, the genre of comédie-ballet effectively died with its creator, leaving Le Bourgeois gentilhomme subject to scholarly and critical distortion that for centuries erroneously considered it flawed as dramatic art, while all the while acknowledging its popularity. One of the company's most produced works, the play has seen no fewer than four productions at the Comédie Française since the Second World War, those directed by Jean Meyer, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean-Laurent Cochet, and Jean-Luc Boutté. If audience reaction is any indication, Benoit's recent staging ranks among the best.

Following on the heels of his award-winning productions of Molière's Les Fourberies de Scapin (1997) and Gogol's Le Revizor (1999), Benoit's Bourgeois gentilhomme can certainly be seen as partially vindicating Jean-Pierre Miquel's philosophy as administrateur général (artistic director). Miquel, whose extended term (1993-2001) ended in July, had been roundly criticized in the French press for his less-than-adventurous programming choices, especially for his choice of directors. Many feel that his decision to not risk "playing to empty houses" may have stifled the company, favoring programming that did not push the artistic envelope in ways that capitalized on the impressive structural changes he championed, including the expansion of the troupe, substantive revision of its statutes, the renovation of the Salle Richelieu, and the acquisition of the new Studio Theatre in the Carrousel du Louvre. But Benoit (along with Mathias Langhoff, Andrei Serban, and several others) serves as an exception for those who would criticize Miquel's choice of directors, an exception demonstrating that forward-looking interpretations of the classics can be both conceptually exciting as well as popular.

Benoit's production was highly conceptual, but did not actively seek to update, deconstruct or distort. Foregrounding the spectacular, at little expense to the dramatic action, the production supplanted the relative austerity of Lully's original score with lush Mozartian strains that emphasized an over-reaching, late-baroque splendor, and enhanced the eclectic choreography (by Lionel Hoche) of the musical interludes, already so well-integrated into the play. At the center of his mise en scène was the production's scenography, which proposed the baroque theatre itself as a touchstone for the psychic brinksmanship that Molière represents, the teetering between reality and fantasy in the mind of M. Jourdain (Michel Robin), and the spinning out of control that results when these two worlds collide.

Alain Chambon, who designed both the scenery and costumes, set the beginning of the play in a baroque theatre that M. Jourdain has constructed in his home with the hope of impressing Dorimène. This private theatre, of which the Salle Richelieu (and we, its audience) became an extension, was outfitted with elaborate painted wings and backdrops, footlights and chandeliers, an onstage harpsichord, and an orchestra pit into which performers were seen to come and go. Preparations were signaled by scene painters' scaffolding, stray tie-lines that controlled the rise and fall of backdrops, and the rushing about of the many artisans and lackeys that M. Jourdain has hired to fit-up the impending spectacle. When the masters of music, dancing, fencing, and philosophy came to blows in their heated debates over the hierarchy of the arts, the audience was palpably in the midst of theatre in the making, with Jourdain himself the locus of this baroque self-fashioning. As Benoit's programme notes described, "[Jourdain] a créé "son" théâtre de la noblesse: il en possède les costumes, il apprend le texte, il répète...