When Tony Harrison transposed his version of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the 17th century to the early 1970s, he managed with his characteristic and brilliant combination of savagery and wit to make the play feel totally contemporary. For Andrew Hilton’s new production at the Bristol Old Vic, Harrison has tweaked the play into the 21st century, with characters clutching iPhones and boasting of their connections with Sarkozy. Molière’s masterpiece is about human failings and the reason this classic makes us laugh today is because we recognise ourselves in the characters' parade of foibles.
Hilton, who has established a well-deserved national reputation for his outstanding stripped-down productions of Shakespeare at south Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, has always focused his work on the text. Tony Harrison’s rhyming version, which maintains a beautifully literary quality that coexists with the immediacy of everyday speech, is rendered with great clarity by all the cast. Harrison has long been convinced of the power in rhythm and rhyme and the way in which these forms hold the attention and open the imagination, almost like song. The cyclical nature of rhyming couplets draws you in and never lets go. Harrison works both with this structure and against it, in a ceaseless creative play with form that, while true to Molière’s spirit, is also engagingly new.
Alceste, a slave to his passionate rejection of society’s hypocrisies, hates the human race. There is something of the adolescent’s terrible teens in his relentless accusations. But his vulnerability, not least to the undermining tugs of jealousy, makes him an all too human and at times contradictory figure. This is not an easy part to play, and while Simon Armstrong brings to it a great deal of vigour and charm, a sense of comic timing and some of the nuancing which the character requires, he does not quite pull it off.
The other characters, all of them foils and satellites to Alceste’s tormented rantings, display, to various extents, the faults which drive the misanthropic anti-hero wild: Philip Buck’s reasonable and empathetic Philinte and Daisy Douglas’s gentle Eliante come closest to feeling for Alceste. Byron Mondahl (Oronte) shines in a virtuoso comic performance, riding a camped-up roller-coaster from self-inflation to abject disillusion. Célimène is everyone’s love interest, a sharp-tongued monster of beauty, charm and duplicity. That Alceste should be so much in love with her provides one of the play’s most appealing contradictions. Dorothea Myer-Bennett captures the character’s repartee-driven zest and superficiality, and when Célimène does, finally yet fleetingly, allow herself to feel, Myer-Bennett finds a touching moment among a prevailing tone of bitch, boast and gossip. The most accomplished – both hilarious and spine-tingling – performance comes from Lucy Black as Arsinoé (pictured above), dressed uptight in her Chanel look-alike suit, a blistering portrayal of an insecure middle-aged woman who uses her tongue in defence of her fading looks.
For The Misanthrope is very much a play about the human weaknesses we all share - deep insecurity regarding the opinions of others and our status in society which drives us to play out endless charades and criticise others behind their backs, all in order to avoid a few moments of introspection. The central irony of the play lies in Alceste’s own addiction to a spiel which enables him to feel better about himself – although he is still pretty miserable. Hilton’s production fizzes with life and while it does not have quite the intimacy that he has achieved in the round at the Tobacco Factory, the extension of the stage into the stalls brings the actors and the play close to the audience. This is an immensely enjoyable show – and a disturbing one too: without doubt a comedy, but one which expresses some of the inevitable and so tragic contradictions of the human condition.
- The Misanthrope at Bristol Old Vic until 23 October
