‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and in ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years’ experience directing and translating Molière, this text explores how the playwright strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter, and investigates four key topics relating to this achievement: Molière’s early experiences that lead to his later theater experiences; his central great plays of love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the stage; and the final words and performances of his life.
'Molière on Stage' takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière's plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and in ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years' experience directing and translating Molière, this text explores how the playwright strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter, and investigates four key topics relating to this achievement: Molière's early experiences that lead to his later theater experiences; his central great plays of love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the stage; and the final words and performances of his life.
From 1680 until the French Revolution, when legislation abolished restrictions on theatrical enterprise, a single theatre held sole proprietorship of Molière’s works. After 1791, his plays were performed in new theatres all over Paris by new actors, before audiences new to his works. Both his plays and his image took on new dimensions. In Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife, Mechele Leon convincingly demonstrates how revolutionaries challenged the ties that bound this preeminent seventeenth-century comic playwright to the Old Regime and provided him with a place of honor in the nation’s new cultural memory. Leon begins by analyzing the performance of Molière’s plays during the Revolution, showing how his privileged position as royal servant was disrupted by the practical conditions of the revolutionary theatre. Next she explores Molière’s relationship to Louis XIV, Tartuffe, and the social function of his comedy, using Rousseau’s famous critique of Molière as well as appropriations of George Dandin in revolutionary iconography to discuss how Moliérean laughter was retooled to serve republican interests. After examining the profusion of plays dealing with his life in the latter years of the Revolution, she looks at the exhumation of his remains and their reentombment as the tangible manifestation of his passage from Ancien Régime favorite to new national icon. The great Molière is appreciated by theatre artists and audiences worldwide, but for the French people it is no exaggeration to say that the Father of French Comedy is part of their national soul. By showing how he was represented, reborn, and reburied in the new France—how the revolutionaries asserted his relevance for their tumultuous time in ways that were audacious, irreverent, imaginative, and extreme—Leon clarifies the important role of theatrical figures in preserving and portraying a nation’s history.
This book critically analyzes the body of English language translations Moliere’s work for the stage, demonstrating the importance of rhyme and verse forms, the creative work of the translator, and the changing relationship with source texts in these translations and their reception. The volume questions prevailing notions about Moliere’s legacy on the stage and the prevalence of comedy in his works, pointing to the high volume of English language translations for the stage of his work that have emerged since the 1950s. Adopting a computer-aided method of analysis, Ploix illustrates the role prosody plays in verse translation for the stage more broadly, highlighting the implementation of self-consciously comic rhyme and conspicuous verse forms in translations of Moliere’s work by way of example. The book also addresses the question of the interplay between translation and source text in these works and the influence of the stage in overcoming formal infelicities in verse systems that may arise from the process of translation. In so doing, Ploix considers translations as texts in and of themselves in these works and the translator as a more visible, creative agent in shaping the voice of these texts independent of the source material, paving the way for similar methods of analysis to be applied to other canonical playwrights’ work. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, adaptation studies, and theatre studies
Exploring each of Molière's 33 plays (including the divertissements) for its theatrical possibilities, Bermel deals with dramatic structures, settings, roles and their interactions, original productions, and outstanding recent stage performances in France, Britain, and the United States. His emphasis is theatrical rather than literary, philosophical, or biographical, although he necessarily brings these considerations to bear when discussing certain plays. Bermel introduces a new methodology, one featuring the type of scrutiny directors, actors, and designers apply to any play before and during rehearsal. Thus he studies the dramatic implications of each scene or part of a scene by noting which characters are present, which ones are absent, and why. He analyzes each role, explores interactions among characters, traces the significance of structure, considers how much information is provided and who provides it, and examines such notable background factors as setting, season, and scenic arrangement. Using this methodology, Bermel provides new interpretations of Molière's most celebrated plays and demonstrates that many of the less famous plays also deserve attention. Previous Molière critics have been conservative, especially in that they favor traditional stagings; Bermel, however, encourages new explorations of the plays. His main intention is to keep Molière alive and vital for present and future readers and audiences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his attention to, and sympathy for, female characters and their points of view.
These are the best of Moliere's masterful one-acts, blending broad farce and pointed wit to express his never-ending delight in human foibles. But Moliere is more than just the "master of the laugh," for behind the comic gestures of these matchless rogues, tight-fisted masters, possessive lovers and elegant ladies lurk fears, insecurities and their consequences. Includes: The Jealous Husband, The Flying Doctor, Two Precious Maidens Ridiculed, The Imaginary Cuckold, The Rehearsal at Versailles, The Forced Marriage, The Seductive Mistress.
This collection focuses on Moliere's theatre as works to be performed as well as read. The essays deal in their various ways with limits which are imposed and respected or violated and broken. The question of transgression both as a subject within Moliere's plays and as a dilemma confronting Moliere's critics and interpreters is addressed. The book aims to enlarge the scope of academic scholarship and include the thinking and insights of actors.
Condemned and banned for five years in MoliA]re's day, "Tartuffe "is a satire on religious hypocrisy. Tartuffe worms his way into Orgon's household, blinding the master of the house with his religious "devotion," and almost succeeds in his attempts to seduce his wife and disinherit his children before the final unmasking.
