Performing Molière's Comedies: Challenges and Approaches

Performing Molière’s Comedies Challenges and Approaches Biliana Stoytcheva-Horissian Comedy has no limits. —Don Richardson, Acting without Agony Comedy has a long history before and after Jean-Baptiste Poquelin—later known as Molière—began exploring his dramatic ability, but time has proven the ageless quality, critical power, and contemporary sound of his works. Molière defied time, space, and language boundaries, and his comedies have survived changes of style, society , and taste, becoming icons of comic writing. This essay offers four separate approaches for handling common stumbling blocks in performing Molière. I have selected The School for Wives,1 Molière’s first great verse comedy, to demonstrate suggested methods and techniques when needed. The play offers possibilities for a wide range of interpretations. In a unique way it balances the extremely physical, improvisational , dynamic world of the Italian street theatre with the neoclassical , seventeenth-century French elegance and brilliance of verbal wit so typical of Molière’s comedies. The greatest of all writers of French comedy employed most of comedy’s traditional forms. As an actor and a leader of an acting troupe, Molière was familiar with every form of stage performance in Paris and the provinces , including the works of other famous playwrights, old-fashioned farces, and the popular commedia dell’arte troupes. Molière found an inspiration for his dramatic efforts in the tradition of literary comedy, yet his works represent a fascinating blend of styles that defies simple classification . Molière’s comedies require a sound understanding of the principles of comic writing and the nature and function of humor. Additionally , they challenge actors to demonstrate and incorporate a wide variety of comic acting techniques into performance. As Andrew Calder put it, “Molière combines subject, characters, dia- Performing Molière’s Comedies 53 lectic, and plot in such a way that all work together to provide a coherent action which unfolds with regularity and a strong sense of inevitability from the beginning of the first act to the end of the fifth.”2 The comedies are classic examples of combinations of various comic writing devices. They often include series of plot complications, dramatic irony, discrepant awareness and ignorance of characters, incongruous actions and juxtaposition of oppositions, surprises and unexpected turns of events, trust and deception, reversal and contradiction, tension built through repetition, chance and coincidences, a considerable amount of physical action, and a comic denouement that brings balance and harmony. Comedy is anchored in incongruity and surprise, imbalance and absurdity , aggressiveness and cruelty, or repetition and extremes, and the actor ’s choices need to reflect a corresponding interest in the extraordinary. Elements of comedy manifest themselves in all of Molière’s plays—and respectively in every character and every scene of The School for Wives— through the relationships and interactions between characters, their incongruous actions and surprising behavior, or juxtaposition of the reality of the play and the reality of the audience. As an acting pedagogue, coach, and director, I have discovered that the complexity of Molière’s works often overwhelms actors, and they therefore do not know where to start the exploration. I devised a series of activities that allow actors to focus on a single aspect of performing and place an emphasis on each one of the aforementioned considerations . Through exploration, actors discover an effortless way to synthesize physical and vocal choices, emotional depth, and intellectual ideas. Act 2, scene 2 of The School for Wives provides a clear example of contrasting characters, clear relationships and objectives, quick pace and verbal exchanges, specific physical action, and a blend of high and low comedy. The plot of The School for Wives revolves around Arnolphe, a fortytwo -year-old, powerful, possessive, selfish, and confident owner of the house, who is painfully afraid of the possibility of being cuckolded by an educated wife. Therefore, he has kept Agnes, a young, naive, and simple girl, ignorant for thirteen years so that he can safely marry her without the danger of deceit. According to his plan, not knowing about the complexity of the world, she will trust his lessons, follow his lead, and fulfill his every wish. Unfortunately for Arnolphe...