Michaelmas Term Plays: Molière
More Recent News »
The Drama Department’s November production comprised a double bill featuring two comic plays by Molière: The Shotgun Wedding and Don Juan. These were preceded by an engaging piece of stand-up entertainment that established, in vivid manner, the world of street performance so relevant to an intelligent understanding of these plays.
Left to perform on a rough platform stage recreated in the Ellis Theatre and bereft of any special effects or song-and-dance routines with which to distract or disguise, the cast had to rely entirely on Molière’s cunning script and their own physical skill in order to engage and communicate.
Don Juan The Shotgun Wedding
Wickedly subversive, Molière's Don Juan confronts audiences with an unsettling picture of the world. We are left wondering just how to respond to a Don Juan who is a shamelessly irreligious, womanising hedonist but at the same time entirely fearless, penetratingly intelligent and – unlike everyone else he meets – honest.
This is no easy play for performers, either intellectually or stylistically. The young Marlborough cast responded to the challenge with total understanding and physical daring. On the bare platform stage for which Molière wrote and on which he performed, they embraced his broad, commedia-influenced style with panache.
Molière’s demonically devious undermining of all conventional values, which enraged his contemporaries and saw the play forced from the stage and forbidden full publication in 1665, has lost none of its power to surprise and disturb. It may not be the usual stuff of comedy, but it clearly engrossed and delighted its Ellis Theatre audiences, and the foyer buzzed afterwards, not with bland chatter about youthful cavortings on stage but with lively discussion about Molière’s provoking play.
top
The audience had been put in a thoroughly receptive mood by the first part of the double-bill, Molière’s cruel but witty entertainment, The Shotgun Wedding.
This introduced Tom Codrington as the self-satisfied, mean petit bourgeois Sganarelle and exposed his cringe-inducing, lecherous motive for marrying the “foxy, delicious” (and decidedly too young for him) Dorimène. Sganarelle is promptly (and deservedly) shocked by her equally unworthy motive for marrying him – “dosh” – and bamboozled by two insane philosophers, by two mocking gypsies, by Dorimène’s father who can’t wait to get shot of his expensive daughter, and by her brother, the accomplished duellist, Alcidas, who forces Sganarelle at sword’s point to choose between marriage and disembowelling.