Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Sunday, 21 October 2007
Molière/Ivo van Hove: The Misanthrope
The Misanthrope. Text by Molière, translated by Tony Harrison. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Production design by Jan Versweyveld. Costume design by Emilio Sosa. Sound design by Raul Vincent Enriquez. Video design by Tal Yarden. Dramaturgy by Bart van den Eynde. Stage manager: Larry K. Ash. With Bill Camp (Alceste), Jeanine Serralles (Célimène), Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jason C. Brown, Amelia Campbell, Joan Macintosh, Alfredo Narciso and Thomas Jay Ryan. Running time: 110 minutes, no intermission. A production of the New York Theatre Workshop, James C. Nicola, artistic director. At the NYTW, 79 East 4th Street, now through 11 November. Tickets and schedule information here.
As in the greatest comedies (like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale), the reunions and redemptions of The Misanthrope's final curtain are hard-won. After the rise of the bourgeois class in the mid-seventeenth century (and Molière's career fell squarely within that time), the scene of comedy shifted from forests and the court to middle-class living rooms, and witty, comic observations of consumption and middle-class morality replaced more flighty metaphysical considerations of identity and love. The reunions and redemptions are particularly hard-won in director Ivo van Hove's new 21st-century perspective on the play in the New York Theatre Workshop production running through 11 November. The upper-middle-classes are still in for it, but, like Shakespeare, Molière is uncompromising in running through the foolishness of his lovers before giving them their final due of love. So is van Hove. And sentiment has no place.
The first thing one notices about Jan Versweyveld's design is that it's all gray and black, all right angles: the stage is framed and lit coolly, not an element out of place. (Until the final curtain, the unflattering white light from fluorescent fixtures is, well, unkind to the human face: every detail and pore, in Tal Yarden's video close-ups of the performers, is visible via a large video screen on the upstage wall.) And that's as it should be; Molière's Alceste, the unyielding Bill Camp, is all about honesty, people shorn of physical and moral cosmetics.
In the interests of space and time, we'll take the plot of the play, among the greatest and most frequently revived of French comedies, as read. Van Hove opts for Tony Harrison's translation, a straightforward, actable rhyming verse translation possessed of an easy but not facile wit, much freer and more speakable than the commonly available Richard Wilbur version, and for the most part van Hove stages it straight up. For all of the attention that's been given to van Hove's experimental, avant-garde reputation, there's nothing here that seems unnecessarily tacked-on, nothing that doesn't emerge organically from the play.
Even the use of video is particularly apt. Comedy is quite often about the ironic distance between private behavior and public morality, and it only makes sense that, in the age of the picture-snapping cell-phone and the palm-sized digital video recorder, the barriers between bedroom and livingroom, between the street, the foyer, the theatre and the backstage dressing room become more porous, and video is the tool for this. It's especially appropriate here, as Alceste seeks to tear simple facile behaviors from friendship and love; he does so to reach the true core of friendship and love beneath. Honesty is not truth; nor is the destruction of privacy via technology a means to honesty and emotional or political security; often it's merely an occasion for shame. It's Alceste's comic failing, of course, that honesty sets nobody free, least of all him, despite his insistence that the brutally honest life is the only authentic means of existence.
Bill Camp and Jeanine Serralles in
Ivo van Hove's production of The Misanthrope
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
Van Hove locates the growing exteriorisation of contemporary life in its two most conspicuous expressions: its urge to consume and its urge to waste. Alceste, always the self-consciously honest man, makes his physical comment on the age of consumerism by literally rolling in the food and its wrappers at a particularly wasteful buffet party early in the play; later on, he hauls the detritus, the garbage of the wasteful society onto the clean floor of the stage. They serve as signifiers of the emotional consumption and garbage of contemporary lovemaking: shame, jealousy, all the destructive and degrading emotions that love and passion can evoke are scattered across the stage, physically as well as linguistically. So when Camp's Alceste, broken by jealousy and rage, makes his final approach to Jeanine Serralles' wild but tender Célimène, offering his love, he rises from the trash-heap that he's created around himself and approaches her, a complete physical and stinking mess, offering all: and his reward, as it should be in comedy, is her acceptance of him as he accepts her. It is a brutally touching and entirely honest moment.
And it's a beautiful moment because of the performances of Bill Camp and Jeanine Serralles. Camp, especially, brings a stoic dignity and sublime presence to his role, finding the profound pain and wounded abyss in a man who strips himself of all his illusions (one would like to see him take on Lear sometime, and sooner rather than later, so that he could invest that most tragic of stage characters with the physicality it so desperately requires); Serralles, as a woman unable to give up her vivacious physicality in society and live like a hermit with Alceste despite her love, demonstrates as profound an ambivalence, unable to commit to a permanent love; her emotional gestures to him are tentative, despite her determined physical gestures of desire. Of course, this is Molière, and I should also point out that both performers are hilarious in the midst of the knockabout physical farce that threads through the production.
In his notes on the play, van Hove describes his conception of The Misanthrope as hopeful: citing the work of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, van Hove notes the influence on this production of the concept of the "liquid life," in which family, work, social relations have all become more fluid. For van Hove, "It is important that we are not judgmental about this liquid life," which renders his revisioning of The Misanthrope more than a satire of contemporary love and society. Funny (often very funny), yes, even true to Molière's own conception of his own times. Hardly avant-garde or experimental, van Hove brings a kind of hyperrealism to the play. It's a brilliant production, a production of a nearly 400-year-old play that speaks to the life that goes on on the street, outside the theatre, in 2007.
Posted at 9.13 am in /Notices
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