On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel King Planchon Several years ago, in writing about William Ball's fluffy staging of Tartuffe, I complained that Larry Gates was unfunny as Or-gon and that the play's main...
...he cannot look at them...
...Moliere does not write happy endings...
...The joke on Orgon has turned into a bitter statement about his insatiable snobbishness, and, incidentally, that of his mother, Mme...
...instead of peering down at her in the traditional seizure of lust, as if to pry off her dress with his eyeballs...
...He takes Moliere's text as it is, pores over it possibly more attentively than anybody has done before, and finds clues to an interpretation that makes unprecedented dramatic sense...
...nor to have his actors play actors playing with a play...
...Orgon's "passion" went for nothing...
...Planchon's Musketeers relies even more on this fluidity...
...He isn't content to make a classic look dated by loading it down with modern references and slang (Joseph Papp's Hamlet, Richard Schechner's Bacchae, etc., etc...
...It cannot be dismissed as the story of a scoundrel or a hypocrite...
...But the attempt fails...
...Alone or in groups the Villeurbanne actors can take over a stage or surrender it to the next comers with instant, disciplined confidence...
...Fencing duels have a way of turning into minuets, stamping parades, or in one case, a cha-cha-cha...
...Seen in this light, Tartuffe rankles...
...It has comedy, miles of it, yet when directed by Roger Planchon and acted by the Theatre de la Cite de Villeur-banne (recently at the Vivian Beaumont), it changes into a creature difficult to identify out of the standard bestiaries...
...In his two serpentlike wooing scenes with Nelly Borgeaud (Elmire) —especially when he murmurs, 'Teople like us burn with a discreet fire"—she seems fascinated rather than fearful...
...He is announced, but his valet precedes him and bows oafishly to the others...
...Louis XIII asks a courtier the way to the nearest John and, after receiving the involved directions in signs, says, "Thank you, mon brave, this palace is so vast...
...Pernelle, who is even more in love with the impostor than her son is...
...Here, too, an exquisite question-and-answer game is played with the dialogue...
...It is hardly fair to single out Auclair's Tartuffe, Debary's Orgon, or Franchise Seigner's Dorine, magnificent performances all, when the afterthought roles of a police sergeant and the King's adjutant?the latter done by the company's composer, Claude Lochy—have as much vivacity and conviction...
...But in a three-hour spectacle if every little turn were a winner the audience would go blind, deaf and punch-drunk with enjoyment...
...Planchon's last tableau starkly contradicts the usual staging of this scene, in which the family rejoices at Orgon's having been forced to see through Tartuffe's villainy and come to his senses...
...The play, like Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imagi-naire (in which the father wants to marry his daughter to a doctor), is about power and ambition, as well as sex...
...The actors' formal movements ("blocking" is too lumpish a description) and their bantering manage to reveal an unrealized physical, almost animal, attraction between them...
...Now, what if Orgon has a passion, not so much for Tartuffe the man as for what Tartuffe stands for in his eyes—charm, devoutness, a high order of intelligence, dignity, a fine example of mankind...
...Suddenly Planchon switches the balance of power...
...Planchon's model was obviously Jean Vilar, who used to open his plays for the Theatre National Populate in Avignon, not far from Planchon's theater on the outskirts of Lyon...
...Cubes with drawings on four faces are assembled into different pictures and dismantled at top speed...
...Perhaps this is why Planchon begins and ends the two halves of the evening with a painting of a dead Christ, one hand stiffened into a reaching, empty claw...
...Rene Allio's scenery adds to the play's relentless exploration of Or-gon's household...
...For Planchon, Moliere's realism springs from his understanding of family and social ties...
...A realist is generally taken to be an artist who can reproduce surfaces and externals, a photoengraver plus...
...If he has really suffered, and continues to suffer, the nature of the comedy has undergone revision...
...They are afraid of being squeezed out of Orgon's will...
...behind it, thinly hidden, are unmanufactured emotions, love and worry...
...Nor would this version of the play work if the performing were not imbued with out-and-out sincerity...
...Soldiers gallop around with swords between their thighs like kids playing masochistic cowboys...
...Everthing in this production strengthens and clarifies Plan-chon's vision of the play, just as everything in his boisterous Three Musketeers confounds, undercuts and darkens the Dumas novel...
...It may be intermittently interesting to watch Broadway directors over the next 10 years...
...The "wisdom" of the wife Elmire, the brother-in-law Cleante, and of Damis becomes self-protection...
...Most directors see Orgon as an opportunity for advancing a character who, because he is weak, acts the tyrant at home...
...Some of the language matches the visual deftness...
...But is Orgon a comic role...
...He has piled into it enough business to take a Broadway director through 10 seasons...
...The tiff in act two between the young lovers Valere and Mariane, refereed by the maid Dorine, is generally a sequence one wishes ended as soon as it begins...
...And its prestige...
...An enigmatic mailed fist hovers in the air, is shot down by cannon, and retrieved by falcons...
...The lovers affect indifference...
...Cultural life in France has always fed on scandal, and many French critics naturally saw Planchon's production as a homosexual reading...
...Perhaps the most extraordinary scene in this extraordinary production is the climactic end of act three...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel King Planchon Several years ago, in writing about William Ball's fluffy staging of Tartuffe, I complained that Larry Gates was unfunny as Or-gon and that the play's main pipeline of humor had consequently got stuffed up...
...Tartuffe has confessed that he tried to make love to his patron's wife...
...Orgon has not been taught a lesson...
...He endangers their future...
...They want Tartuffe out of the house...
...Three prop men in black, who are also actors, as in the Peking Opera, manipulate a length of cord into doors, windows, and alleyways for the rest of the cast to march, leap, and crawl through...
...Richelieu would like his robe to be neither too long nor too short: "Je la veux ecclesiastique mais coquine...
...The crown has passed on to Planchon...
...In his scene with his daughter he believes that she should be honored to marry a man of Tartuffe's accomplishments...
...But Planchon shuns the easy laughs...
...Played for real, it tells us something more about Tartuffe's hypnotic power before we meet him: Valere has reason to be afraid of losing Mariane to him...
...It looks like clumsy suspense for holding off (and so building up to) Tartuffe's appearance...
...Up to now the relationship between the two men has been a Faust in reverse...
...or they enclose rectangles of moving actors within stockades formed by red and gold flags strung together...
...we get a hint that she just may want him to take her...
...When Tartuffe does make his delayed first entrance, Planchon steals a clever gag from it...
...Orgon sinks his head on Tartuffe's shoulder, clutches his arm, and weeps...
...An unmailed hand emerges from the floor to make signals and deal out punishment...
...Once Planchon has shown us that Orgon is determined to renounce his family in favor of a stranger, the play takes on a new shape in line with his belief that Moliere is "France's greatest realistic visionary...
...They rise out of sight one at a time, act by act, as though the inner carvings were being removed from a Chinese puzzle box, until the ultimate moments confront us with a simple wooden framework and three papered walls at the rear...
...Gullible all over again, God save the mark...
...Planchon founded his troupe in 1957 for the benefit of working-class spectators, like Vilar's...
...He has a rolling, growling voice, low-pitched enough to let him virtually caress the other characters with it while remaining always audible...
...He doesn't ruin with improvements...
...There are bad lines, too, and second-rate effects, and worse...
...Among modern directors Vilar in his heyday was the monarch of French stagecraft, both spectacular and sublime...
...nor to decorate at the edges with improvised donation...
...Is Tartuffe a comedy...
...It hits at the dupe-with-pretensions that Moliere felt in himself and that we, all of us, keenly detect in other people...
...The actual "scandal" does not come from a warped sexual attachment, or even from Moliere's distaste for the mendicant priests of the 17th century, but from Orgon's search for a son and heir...
...Jacques Debary, in contrast, is immensely likeable and immensely in earnest...
...That Tartuffe is a liar, a lecher, and a shepherd's crook in sheep's clothing does not make them saints or oracles...
...Orgon stands apart from his kin...
...Have you met my son-in-law the cleric...
...he is transformed into the penitent and the dependent...
...If Orgon is disappointed with his son Damis, and wants his daughter to marry Tartuffe to give him little Tartuffes as grandsons, we can see that the family's resentment of Tartuffe is not altogether altruistic...
...When Tartuffe offers Dorine a handkerchief to conceal her bosom he turns his head away (a servant, faugh...
...Let another Tartuffe show up and Orgon will play Mr...
...Its comedy is drawn from Orgon's defeated yearnings to try a little practical eugenics, to "upzone" his estate, gild his heraldic chart, push his line nearer nobility...
...It consists of a nest of intricately fitted room settings...
...Tartuffe the smoothie comes on stage right after and scores an extra point for gentility...
...As a metteur en scene Planchon is a revolutionary of the most extreme kind...
...Bringing him into the family elevates the family's quality...
...The boy-faced Michel Auclair presents a Tartuffe who could con eggs from a rooster, and golden eggs at that...
...He still longs for an ennobled progeny...
...The Mephistophelean Tartuffe has played, not a bountiful uncle who will eventually call in the debt, but a dutiful son who will equally call in the debt...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 15
