Molière sous les feux de la rampe by Noël Peacock (review)

This is a valuable book for all Molière scholars and for anybody interested in modern productions of classic plays. The bulk of Noël Peacock’s material is twentieth- and twenty-first century productions of Molière’s plays in France, England, and Scotland. He accesses the productions sometimes through personal experience of them in the theatre or recordings, but mostly through the writings of directors and published reviews. Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is its range of reference to reviews published in a wide variety of newspapers and periodicals. He does not neglect pre-twentieth-century productions of Molière. In fact, the first of his four chapters begins with a detailed survey of Molière’s own productions of his plays, which helps him to deconstruct the myth of a Comédie-Française with a mission to safeguard some kind of authentic production style. Even with our very partial extant evidence, we know that Molière considerably adapted his plays for very different performance conditions. Consideration of the now famous productions of Le Malade imaginaire by Jean-Marie Villégier and William Christie (1990) and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Benjamin Lazar and Vincent Dumestre (2004), with serious claims to authenticity, reveals them to be patently inauthentic in innumerable ways. Peacock shows how productions at the Comédie-Française up to the 1960s tended towards the conservative as a reaction against a nineteenth-century tradition of tragic interpretations, and how productions from the 1970s have been more innovative. The three remaining chapters provide a useful conceptual map for evaluating the many different productions. The second chapter focuses on the contrast between productions aiming to evoke a real world (e.g. André Antoine) and those emphasizing the world of the theatre (e.g. Jacques Copeau) and suggests how others have charted a course between the two (e.g. Jean Vilar’s Théâtre national populaire and productions that exploit celebrity actors like the Tartuffe with Martin Clunes and the Misanthrope with Kiera Knightley). Chapter 3 looks more closely at the kind of things Molière’s plays can be made to represent, surveying in turn Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, and postcolonial productions. Similarly, the fourth chapter explores more fully those productions that have made theatricality central, examining in turn metatheatrical productions (like Dario Fo’s, which privilege mime), those that consciously exploit intertextuality (like Vitez’s performance of L’École des femmes, Tartuffe, Dom Juan, and Le Misanthrope on successive evenings), and what Peacock calls the hyperrealist productions (like Jean-Luc Boutté’s, which ironically deconstruct earlier realist interpretations with an excess of realism). Peacock is judiciously sparing in his own assessments of the productions, allowing the directors and their critics to speak, but he clearly relishes the kaleidoscopic variety of productions to which Molière’s plays have lent themselves, and he is obviously happy to anticipate even more excitingly radical productions. His own libertarian approach, however, is evidently not shared by many of the theatre professionals whom he quotes, whose devastating critiques (see Copeau on p. 93) can sound like Alceste on a very bad day. The dialectic of fidelity to a perceived norm and creative reinterpretation runs throughout Peacock’s book and will ensure that future Molière productions retain the capacity to excite, entertain, and cause controversy.