The Molière Cycle of Antoine Vitez

The Moliere Cycle of Antoine Vitez Judith Gershman In France the trend in recent years has been toward a re-evaluation of the cultural heritage by directors who stage new interpretations of classical plays: dusting them off, making them speak of contemporary problems, weighing them down with exhaustive sociological and psychological research, often done by teams of dramaturgs. Antoine Vitez, on the other hand, attempts to find the purely ancient theatrical traditions of these plays, using the art of the actor (in French, the "jeu," which also means "game") and the pleasure it reflects to restore life to Racine or Molibre, a life that has nothing to do with textbooks,, history books, Freud or Lacan. The dust remains : Vitez does not believe that Moliere and Racine were writing about us. Nor were thay writing historical tracts that should be transformed today into living museum pieces. It is in this spirit that Vitez did his Moliere tetralogy, which premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1978 and which has since toured France, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. The four plays, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, Don Juan and The Misanthrope, were rehearsed simultaneously over a period of six months with a troupe of twelve actors, and were played in repertory. The set was the same forthe four productions: in the background, the suggestion of an Italian palace with trompe-l'oeil columns, used to suggest both interior or exterior scenes. On stage, a table and two chairs. A small number of props circulate throughout the four plays. They include: two candelabras, a walking stick, a book and a handkerchief. For Don Juan there was also a live dove. Costumes were of the period. The tetralogy was designed to be seen as a whole (the plays were done on four consecutive nights in chronological order). Vitez has often said that he felt as though he were directing one long play of 20 acts. Accordingly, the emphasis is not on a clear interpretation of each play, but rather on the correspondence between all four, giving a coherent theatrical portrait of 75 Molibre's universe. The actors concentrate on the correspondence between the four roles they play, rather than on a psychological portrait of each one, thus mirroring the director's effort. Vitez lays the ground rules for the Cycle, which were also the starting point for rehearsals, in the program notes, a text he calls "Fragments." The actors are the key to Vitez's concept of directing. Much like Peter Brook, he de-emphasizes scenic elements. The set is often just the stage itself. The actor recreates space and time and tells his own story through that of the play. Vitez's theories of acting were developed in the course of his work as an acting teacher, first at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq and since 1968 at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, where he totally revolutionized teaching methods by training actors to do their own mise en scene for each scene done in class, attempting to abolish the distinction between theatre and the classroom. There is a strong link between Vitez's work at the Conservatory and his own mises en scene; one nourishes the other. Instead of having a permanent troupe, he works often with former students of his, who have mastered his concept of a collective mise en scene. The most striking element of the Moliere Cycle is the way in which images are created by the actors' bodies in space. Freed from the conventions of naturalism, the actor can use his body to make fleeting theatre paintings that reveal basic elements of Moliere's universe.These are recurring images that can be treated from one play to the next: the lover caressing the foot of the woman he loves, the daughter about to be sold to a man she does not love, sobbing on her knees before her implacable father; the abandoned lover hobbling across the stage because he (or she) has lost a shoe, etc. The characters then become figures; the actors tell a story that is larger than (a slice of) life. Vitez has been directing since the age of thirty-five; in 30 years he has done over...