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L’ECOLE DES FEMMES AND LE DIEU DU CARNAGE |
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Monday, 10 March 2008 |
Central to Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes,
directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent with
Daniel Auteuil in the role of Arnolphe, and
less so in Le Dieu du carnage, written and
directed by Yasmina Reza with Isabelle
Huppert as a wife of a middle class couple,
are two themes: a star name in the cast and
the topic of youth.
L’Ecole des Femmes, written in 1662,
caused a scandal not only because of hints that
Molière might have married his illegitimate
daughter, but because of the subject it
lampoons, the then frequent practice at court
of arranged marriages between a young girl
and a much older man. Arnolphe is so
obsessed with the idea of being cuckolded that
he brings up Agnès from the age of four to be
his wife, hoping that his oppressive education
will make her docile and faithful, shutting her
away from the world and changing his name.
His plan rebounds with the advent of Horace,
a young man who falls in love with Agnès and,
in the farcical structure of mistaken identity,
makes Arnolphe his confidant.
Daniel Auteuil exploits every chance for
farce and melodrama and is as much a
Mr Punch figure as the Molièrian stereotype
of the dangerous obsessive. His performance
is very witty and funny but misses the fact
that, although deluded, Arnophe sincerely
loves Agnès and his genuine suffering clouds
the happy end. On the other hand Lyn Thibault
gives a multilayered and subtle performance
as Agnès. At first it is difficult to tell whether
she has really been turned into a zombie by
Arnolphe’s repression, or whether she is just
playing along. This comic ambiguity keeps
the audience guessing until her native
intelligence prevails and she comes into her
own, in love with perhaps not the right man,
but at least a natural suitor. And indeed Horace
is played by Stephane Vaurupenne as such a
lovelorn fop that the success of their marriage
is anyone’s guess.
Jean-Paul Chambas’s set underlines the
artificiality of Arnolphe’s machinations, and
oils Molière’s double-spring plot. A cut-out
brightly coloured doll’s house, on a revolve,
looming out of a black surround, displays the
action from a number of angles, and carries
the actors to their various destinies.
Thierry Flamand’s set of le Dieu du
Carnage also plays a symbolic role: the
backdrop is a crumbling grey cement wall
with a large crack running through it. Le Dieu
du Carnage brings together two couples who
attempt a reconciliation after the 11-year-old
Reille son has taken a swipe at the son of the
Houillés and knocked out two of his teeth.
Like Molière, this is a comedy of manners that
uses as its targets both the left wing dogooders
and the right wing yuppies, and
reveals the chaos underlying their respective
veneers of civilisation. Action and dialogue
achieve this breakdown at a cracking pace in
the course of 90 minutes as the two couples
degenerate into savages. Social rituals are
disrupted by drunkenness and an epic
vomiting scene, and the dialogue is axed to
bits by a mobile phone. Yasmina Reza’s
production is intelligent and cruelly funny and
Isabelle Huppert’s performance teeters with
tremendous verve into controlled hysteria.
L’Ecole des femmes runs at the Théâtre de
l’Odéon ( 01 44 85 40 40) until March 29,
and
Le Dieu du carnage at the Théâtre Antoine
(01 42 08 77 71) until the end of May
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