The misanthrope is not a common character type among students. Melancholic three pints in, yes. Haggard with an essay hanging over them, or just hungover, certainly. All of these are likely to turn a student’s attitude temporarily sour. But a true, hardened misanthrope I am yet to encounter. So when I heard that Molière’s seventeenth-century satire The Misanthrope was being revived in a new translation by Martin Crimp, my interest was piqued.
Molière’s original misanthrope, Alceste, is the cantankerous product of Louis XIV’s France. Under the reign of Louis XIV (or the Sun King), the nobility was stripped of political agency and restricted to a lifestyle of glitz and rigid etiquette at Versailles. Think balls, cravats and heavy brocade. The rest of the population, meanwhile, were close to starvation. It is against this political backdrop that Alceste glowers down from his impossibly high moral pedestal. The protagonist of Molière’s play strives in vain against the vacuous charm of the court, only to fall in love with a woman who manifests those exact qualities. Alceste’s ambitions towards becoming a self-righteous recluse do not sit well with his attraction to a sparkling socialite. Alceste’s own haughty withdrawal from social performance turns out to be the greatest affectation of all. It is from this well of contradiction that the play draws a good few impish jibes.
Crimp’s twenty-first adaptation gives Alceste a makeover as Sandra Oh in Chelsea boots and faded tweed – the recognisable uniform of a scruffy intellectual with higher things on their mind. In Crimp’s translation, Molière’s protagonist is now called Alice. She is an unapologetic feminist, author, and member of the artistic elite.
The curtain opens on some undefined third space: tastefully inscrutable artwork on the walls; a sculpture of two entwined bodies which is defined enough to be titillating but not really sensual; expensive parquet floorboards. We don’t have much time to sink into the room’s serene lack of personality before Alice charges in, bristling. Her friend, John, follows sheepishly behind and patiently takes her accusations: he has unintentionally patronised a female acquaintance by pretending to remember her name. It’s unforgivable. Next, Alice turns on the audience, snarlingly singling out individuals who look as if they might also be secret upholders of the patriarchy. Finally, she slumps into a chintz armchair, breathing a sigh of relief only once she has disinfected her hands with sanitiser.
The setting shifts to Alice’s own rooms and the decor changes—negligibly. Even with an additional plush seating area and two new paintings, the stage still has the sterile feel of a lobby. Alice’s declaration, ‘I don’t like hotel rooms’ is odd given that she has apparently designed her home like one. I have not, however, been entirely fair to the staging. There are clear efforts to meld art deco vapidity with the spirit of a seventeenth-century salon. Carved wooden cornicing and Baroque archways offset the otherwise dull furniture. The effect doesn’t quite come off though, since a space which resembles a waiting room is hardly a fair equivalent to the lively atmosphere of a Parisian salon. It’s like claiming the Schwarzman Centre as a successor to the Rad Cam.
Further occasions arise for Alice to exercise her churlish views, but the vulturous narrowing of the eyes soon becomes a bit repetitive. A bright-eyed Gen Z book blogger enters to ask for advice on her clumsy first attempt at a novel and receives the predictable merciless treatment. By the time Alice has huffed herself to exhaustion, we are left in no doubt of the play’s central theme: should we choose civility or sincerity? Do we submit to basic courtesy in order to keep some social cohesion (and our own sanity) ticking along, or do we courageously object to every undesirable comment in the name of progress?
In bringing Molière to the twenty-first century there has, however, been a misjudgement. Molière grew from and dramatised the sharp social critique of the French Moralists, whose pithy maxims established a basis for secular morality. Writers such as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère are persuasive, even today, because of their capacity for self-critique. They do not set themselves up as paragons of virtue, and we are more receptive to their advice as a result. Sandra Oh’s Alice suffers from a lack of irony. She mows down her friends and family with views which are in themselves highly commendable, but are demeaned by her failure to exercise self-scrutiny. The French Moralists, rooted in Enlightenment skepticism, realised something crucial: if moral standards were going to be issued by fallible human beings rather than a divine source, the writer’s own flaws would have to be acknowledged and conveyed to the reader. It is a lesson which Alceste’s reincarnation would do well to remember.
When I returned home that evening, I flicked through a collection of La Bruyère’s maxims in the hope of finding something which might sum up this play for me. I needed a line, anything, to focus my thoughts. Here is what I found:
“Men find it difficult to appreciate one another … they are so full of their own ideas that there is no room for anyone else’s.”