Too bad for us [Molière] left the play in French
Which no one speaks ─ except, of course, the French,
And pompous types who bandy terms like “genre.”
Is it a compliment, or does it honor a
Great work, to render it in our tongue? (Ives: 3)

Because of the increasing new productions and adaptations of Molière’s plays on the British contemporary stage — one being the recent Tartuffe directed by Iqbal Khan for the RSC, Stratford 20181 — we should question the meaning of such a theatre in the British theatrical landscape. Why is there a revival of the French classics (Molière’s plays being far from the only ones to be adapted) in national venues?2 What do these adaptations say about the public’s tastes and expectations? Why is theatre so appropriate a space for verse to remain ‘popular’ and meaningful, especially in our consumerist societies? And how is the new meaning of Molière’s plays conveyed?

In the vast range of plays translated, rewritten or ‘translaptated’3 by English playwrights, Le Misanthrope has been one of the most favoured: Richard Wilbur offered a translation in 1955 (revised in 1965-6); in 1973 Tony Harrison was commissioned by the National Theatre for writing a new version, setting the plot in 1966 (precisely three hundred years after the first performance of the original play) and, in parallel, celebrating the tercentenary of Molière’s death (1673). This version was revived and performed at the Old Vic in 2010. Liz Lochhead set her version (2002) in the early years of the Scottish Parliament and satirised the Scottish Labour’s relationship with the media. Robert Cohen translated and directed Molière’s play, which premiered at the University of California, Irvine campus in 1997. The script received excellent reviews.4 This rhyming translation kept the play’s original context (1666) but added a contemporary energy.5 Very recent adaptations have included Justin Fleming’s (for the Bell Shakespeare Company and on tour, 2018, in varied rhyme schemes); Roger McGough’s (Liverpool Playhouse, 2013, both in verse and prose); Frances Poet’s (Glasgow’s Òran Mór, 2014, in rhyming couplets), but those that have retained my attention for the present study are Ranjit Bolt’s, Martin Crimp’s, and David Ives’s, respectively produced in 2008 (West Yorkshire Playhouse), 2009 (the Comedy Theatre) and 2017 (Lansburgh Theatre, Washington, 2011-2).

The three of them share common features (in style, lexicon and purposes) but are also striking for their idiosyncrasies, especially since they were all published within a short period and served specific companies as well as different publics. In a way they have competed with, and completed, one another. Hence the focus of my analysis will be to confront these three versions so as to answer the various issues raised above, mainly: what were the formal choices made by the playwrights and why? How were the plays performed and how successful were they? How do they highlight Molière’s play and to what extent do they convey its relevance today? These questions will hopefully tackle the very purpose of translating a similar text repeatedly and draw attention to the dynamic relationship between the singularity of the source and the multiplicity of its interpretations.

Keeping the Tempo but Reshuffling the Register

Considering formal aspects, Bolt’s play (rather than “translation”) might seem to be the one sharing more characteristics with Molière’s than Crimp’s or Ives’s. And yet because of its new title — The Grouch, depicting a person who is always complaining and not someone who dislikes and distrusts mankind in general as a misanthrope does — the author immediately hints at the shifts away from the original script he unavoidably permits himself to do. Bolt, who has published his thoughts on the business of translation, has indeed explained that conveying the meaning of a classic does not imply a mere rendition of words: “There is really no such thing as a good translation that is not, to a greater or lesser extent, creative” (Bolt 2010: preface). It is no surprise if Bolt entitled his essay The Art of Translation (my emphasis) if only to state that his purpose is not merely to convey words and meaning into another language; his aim is to recreate (or rewrite) a play. For him translators are skilful playwrights.

In The Grouch the dramatis personae immediately imply the updating of the plot in a contemporary Anglophone context: Alceste (Molière’s misanthrope) has become Alan, Philinte is Philip, Oronte / Orville, Célimène / Celia, and so on. The stage directions of act one complete the temporal transposition: “CELIA’s drawing room. / ALAN (sitting on a sofa), PHILIP, both with glasses of wine. There is a bowl of nuts on a table to which PHILIP keeps helping himself during the following” (Bolt 2008: 7). Lots of allusions to pop culture are made: Facebook, Apple Mac, Mr Bean, Madonna, Spielberg, Bridget Jones; Orville’s poem is compared to rap; tabloids and newspapers like The Guardian are referred to and colloquial language is mixed with more elaborate metaphors.

For Bolt has indeed imposed formal constraints on his script despite its obvious modernity. His play is also divided into five acts and is written in verse. Lines are regular octosyllables following the rhyming scheme AA/BB/CC although there are also eye-rhymes and irregularities as seen at the onset of the first act:

PHILIP: Alan? (Silence.) What’s wrong?
ALAN:                                                                   Leave me alone!
PHILIP: You’re the / oddest / man I’ve / ever / known!
Our friendship veers from peak to through.
ALAN: Look will you kindly just piss off! (Bolt 2008: 7)

Here “alone/known” rhyme while “through/off” do not. Line two ends with a masculine rhyme, the monosyllabic word “known” is stressed, which adds a syllable to the line. Line three is more ambiguous since “Our” can count for either one or two feet /′aʊə/ whether the diphthong is decomposed or not (/′a ‖ ʊə/).

In other instances, the style is flowery and eloquent. Molière is never too far… neither is Shakespeare:

ALAN: (Laying straight into [Celia]) Name any crime that men commit –
Your treachery more than matches it!
No fiend more fierce and foul and fell
Was ever loosed on us from Hell! (Bolt 2008: 63)

David Ives also composed his School For Lies in verse. Lines are regular pentameters, sometimes with feminine endings, but usually strict decasyllables with rhyming couplets. For pronunciation and metrical purposes a ‘Note’ was added under the characters’ list to help the reader/actor keep the tempo: “‘Madame’ should be pronounced ‘muhdamm’ while ‘Madam’ ‘madd-um’” (Ives: 2). More drastic alterations were made, however, in the linguistic and thematic fields. Scenes have been deleted, others added such as the incipit where Philinte plays the role of a prologue as in a Shakespearean opening:

[(…) At rise: the actor playing PHILINTE addresses the audience.]

PHILINTE: Monsieur Molière, unfortunately dead,
Sends fond regrets from his eternal bed.
For it was he with an immoral play
Who mixed the batter for tonight’s soufflé
In 1666 — his entertainment
Titled The Misanthrope. A dark arrangement
Of human life and love and hope, blah blah,
But funny, too, and I mean funny ha-ha. (Ives: 3)

Here the humorous tone is set as well as the connection between the classic period and its revision. Ives clearly owes allegiance to his predecessor while he also straight away departs from him to propose another recipe for the “soufflé”, with more contemporary ingredients – “blah-blah” and “ha-ha” being obvious allusions to this new direction. The play includes only two acts and offers a different ending when Alceste who has come back from exile and Celimene leave the stage together to explore the world.

Martin Crimp goes a step further in formal changes although his version is a little older (1996). Crimp decided not to keep a regular rhythmic pattern, justifying his choice in the preface to his edition: “[how] do you translate […] an artefact that is so much a product of seventeenth-century Paris and Versailles? One answer – and the one I’ve attempted here – is to opt for a contemporary setting, and then explore the consequences, whatever deviations and departures from the original that may involve” (Crimp: v).

The functions and sometimes the names of the characters have been changed: Alceste is a playwright, John (Philinte) is mentioned as “his friend”; Célimène has become “Jennifer” and is a movie star; there is a critic (Covington) and a journalist (Ellen), a “teacher of acting” (Marcia) and another actor (Julian), an agent (Alexander), a motorbike messenger and a musician. “The time is now, the place is London”, the stage directions indicate. Following the chronology of the original play, the tone is however darker from the beginning onward. The society Crimp presents is made of pomp and money and addresses criticism against the artistic system in an oblique meta-dramatic way since the world depicted is precisely the one he, as a writer, is part of. This is however another adaptation of Molière’s script, which also stood as a critique of the social morals (or rather immorality) of seventeenth-century France. The target is different here; the vocabulary has changed but corruption is denounced sometimes with irony, sometimes in a more scathing and biting tone as in act one when John is questioning Alceste about his viewpoint:

JOHN
Are you saying that humanity should be condemned?

ALCESTE
I’m saying that humanity as we know it – yes –
should come to an end. […]
I have a dream of a clean white space
entirely disinfected of the human race. (Crimp: 8-9)6

These words, although deeply ironical, depict the vision of an apocalyptic world, which, at the beginning of the play, may sound rather extremist and daunting.

As in Bolt’s and Ives’s versions, Crimp confronts the past and the present within his twofold text where the contemporaneous context is not totally disconnected from Molière’s background. Echoes abound and parallels between the scripts are easily recognizable. On stage, a similar juxtaposition is often strengthened if only to motivate the conversation between generations and keep the poise between poetic and theatrical flows.

Past and Present on Stage

If Molière’s and the other playwrights’ scripts are compared horizontally, the linguistic transpositions look obvious, often to push the satire a step further and have it sound coherent with modern-day issues. See for example Alceste’s long derogatory description of humanity that is developed at the beginning of Molière’s play:

Molière	Crimp	Bolt	Ives
[…] je hais tous les hommes Les uns, parce qu’ils sont méchants et malfaisants, Et les autres, pour être aux méchants complaisants, Et n’avoir pas pour eux ces haines vigoureuses. Que doit donner le vice aux âmes vertueuses. De cette complaisance on voit à plein le traître : Partout il est connu pour tout ce qu’il peut être ; Et ses roulements d’yeux et son ton radouci, N’imposent qu’à des gens qui ne sont point d’ici. […] Act I, sc.1, 118-128.	(…) I hate everyone. And not just people in the public eye, but the public themselves who just stand by and watch – whose understanding’s limited to absorbing a few selected images. As you know, I’m in the potentially disastrous position Of allegedly slandering this wretched politician Just by asking why his touchy-feel party’s quite So cosy with a bloated member of the European ultra right. (…) p. 8 (emphasis is mine)	(…) There’s no one I don’t execrate. People are either evil, or Simply by failing to abhor The evil ones’ behaviour, they Condone it, in a tacit way. Look at this lawsuit I’ve got now: How can society allow The swine I‘m fighting to exist Still less, implicitly assist His machinations? (…) p. 12–13.	Where are the great men of the Renaissance? We spend our days discussing restaurants! What shows we’ve seen! It being our highest attainment To waste a lifetime viewing entertainment. Tasteless commedias whose collective text Could be our one-word motto: “NEXT!” (…), p. 13.

Molière developed the motif of dishonesty at length, which, considering the importance of the word in the seventeenth-century French noble sphere, appeared to be logical. Molière’s Alceste denounces men’s hypocrisy although he himself cannot be considered an “honest” man devoid of immorality and ambiguity. The significance of “honesty” in Molière’s time being the depiction of “an accomplished man who is the living example of a cultural and moral refinement that worldly society longs for”7, does not indeed befit Alceste’s condition. Seen from this angle, irony sounds profoundly cruel in Molière’s text since Alceste, whose role is to denounce the evils of humanity, denigrates and ridicules himself at once.

We see that in Bolt’s and Crimp’s versions, the criticism seems to be solely directed towards the society outside with clear allusions to the political tensions of the times. Crimp hints at the increasing influence of the far right in England (in 1997 the British National Party would get more than 35,000 ballots, five times more than in 1992) but also targets the prime minister who, further down in the cue, gets a particularly vicious tongue-lashing from Alceste for “his toxic, spray-on brand of fake compassion” (Crimp: 8). As for Bolt, his Alceste (Alan) depicts the corruption of the whole system in more general allusions (“machinations” in the extract above) since Alan is, right from the beginning, sued by “a fraud, a charlatan, a lying, scheming hypocrite” (Bolt 2008: 13) because of his excessive frankness. The efficiency of the invectives might sound more striking in Bolt’s script because of the short lines in which monosyllabic words work as daggers, but they also ironically trigger humour, as when Alan describes the hypocritical society as “a sort of national contest / To find out who can arse-lick best” (Bolt 2008: 9. My emphasis.) Crimp’s tone is undoubtedly scathing while alluding to the blood tie that his play shares with Molière’s:

ALCESTE
No I’m not [joking].
Not when I’ve got
so many examples in front of me
of private political and artistic hypocrisy.
I’m enraged. I can’t forgive
the way that men and women choose to live.
Everywhere you look: sycophants, compromise, hypocrites,
nepotism, betrayal, vested interest –
I’ve had enough. Call it insanity
but I take issue with the whole of humanity.

JOHN
I have to say that this so-called rage
would make more sense on the seventeenth-century stage.
And surely as a playwright you’re aware
of sounding like something straight out of Molière. (Crimp: 7)

Despite Alceste’s strong criticism of twentieth-century society (as in Molière the words “hypocrisy” and “hypocrites” are twice mentioned), the reference to Molière in a metadramatic context (Alceste is also a playwright) inevitably debunks the otherwise tragic tone.

In Ives’s School For Lies, the echo of Molière’s lines is more insidious as we cannot always find the exact lexical equivalent of the source. Even though Ives alludes to the former context of the play in the extract mentioned above (‘the great men of the Renaissance’), the idea more than the word is transposed. In his adaptation for Michael Khan’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington DC) in 2017, Ives’s dramatis personae, their functions and their actions, were compared to those of Much Ado About Nothing more than to those of the French classic, Frank and Celimene being the counterparts of Benedick and Beatrice while Philinte, ‘Don Pedro-like’, tricked them into each believing that the other loved them. Reviews of the performance indicate that Ives took many liberties in his 2017 translation (rather coined as a “rewriting”) that was also a revision of the 2011 text to respond to the current political climate in Washington DC: “Making the play anti-Trump [gave the audience] the opportunity to pretend that Celimene’s slimy suitors couldn’t possibly […] be them” (Bradshaw).

Still, in these three adaptations what makes the dialogue between past and present even more obvious is often the setting chosen by their directors who emphasize some kind of chiasmus between form and content. Indeed in the case of Khan’s production of Ives’s play in 2017, the costumes represented seventeenth-century Parisian fashion: colourful wigs, beauty spots, extravagant ribbons excessively adorning the sleeves, the socks, the shirts and the shoes, as well as affected manners and improbable postures definitely triggered laughter, thus turning the play into a true comedy of manners while The Misanthrope has more ambiguous undertones.

In both Crimp’s and Bolt’s parallel productions, the sets were much more modern than in Ives’s. In The Grouch presented in Leeds (dir. Sarah Esdaile, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 2008), the decor included a white wooden floor and a towering white wall punctured by Georgian-style windows, beyond which one could perceive the rain falling. A white spiral staircase rose from below the stage to two gantries high above it while two pink sofas with tables gave the impression of an artificial but cold inner space. Such contemporary aesthetics contrasted with the formal rigour that Bolt had required for his version but efficiently counterbalanced the time gap that verse drama might produce on today’s audience. In Thea Sharrock’s direction of Crimp’s Misanthrope almost the same year (Comedy Theatre, London, 2009), the world-famous movie star Keira Knightley made her theatre debut in the role of Jennifer (Célimène) while Alceste was performed by the red-headed Band of Brothers actor, Damian Lewis. Unlike the flagrant dichotomy between words and images in the staging of The Grouch, the fashionable cast as well as the Hildegard Bechtler stylish set of Sharrock’s production perfectly matched the punchy modern-day language of Crimp’s text.

Still these various aesthetic choices are not only a means by which translators and playwrights make a classic reach today’s audiences and readership but also – and more interestingly – a challenging way to assess the contemporary meaning a three hundred-year-old play can still convey.

Molière “Our Contemporary”

Basing his analysis on Richard Wilbur’s translation (1965), Seymour Rudin argued that “[t]he play’s peculiar interest for us […] lies not in its effective theatricality, its unflagging verbal adroitness […] its neatness of construction. It lies in its theme of the conflict between individual and social imperatives […].”8 This issue has been particularly focused on by the three authors mentioned in this study. While Crimp obviously points out the absurdities of our media-driven celebrity-culture, Bolt deals with political correctness since the target of Alan’s wrath is a Newsnight Review commentator (Habib Nasib Nader), who reads racism into Alan’s too-frank review of his poetry and threatens him with the Press Complaints Commission. Despite their witty tones, both plot adaptations have however often been seen as the mere shadows of the original. And indeed Molière’s Alceste risks arrest for his attack on a court versifier while Crimp’s or Bolt’s equivalent misanthropes hazard very little.

Today “we look for multiple meanings” Rudin adds

[…] and one source of the special richness that we find in The Misanthrope is the sense that its protagonist is an ambiguous figure and that our reactions to and judgments of him may be curiously divided ones. (…) To us, he may be a (…) character, foolishly at odds with the norms of society or a tragic hero (as the Romantics described him) or “not quite either”. (Rudin: 308)

The ambiguity of the main character is still present in Ives’s, Bolt’s or Crimp’s versions. In the latter for instance, set in the glamorous suite of a London hotel, Alceste’s behaviour sounds both daring and ridiculous. He who is obsessed with the movie star, even though she represents everything he abhors, delivers his harangues with acuteness and wit as his misanthropy is “partly a mask for his own corrosive sense of fear and failure” (Spencer).

In Ives’s “translaptation” (which has been much better praised by reviewers) the vehemence of the main character is more caricatured. The play (in its shorter 2017 version) was performed at a fast pace, as though it were a French bedroom farce, and the potential incoherence of Frank’s personality had no major importance compared to the grotesque tricks and puns he was the victim of. As for Bolt’s version, there are elements that may not work today such as, for instance, Alan’s retreat to the country because no paper will publish his work unless he adopts a “polite PC façade”, which in the twenty-first century sounds improbable, even silly. If, just as Molière’s Alceste, Bolt’s Alan fights against the hypocrisies of society, his dual personality however lacks that “compassionate understanding of human follies that has made Molière’s Misanthrope timeless” (Brennan).

The other reason why Molière’s play is timeless is that there is a space for uncertainty whereby we question the author’s view to depicting the vices of the world in such a delightful way. It is an oxymoronic use of drama that it can both entertain and edify the reader / audience. Not surprisingly did Rousseau argue that Moliere had “debased the play by exciting easy, thoughtless laughter at the spectacle of an honest man’s loneliness and despair amid society’s corruptions.”9 Today we still hesitate to classify his play as a comedy because Alceste has a lot of the tragic hero’s lineaments. Contemporary playwrights seem to have opted for more clear-cut outlines: whether in Bolt’s, Crimp’s or Ives’s adaptations, the main protagonist’s contradictions are never to be taken too seriously and rather reflect a very common character of our era, i.e. the naysayer. Yet if Molière’s protagonist has turned into someone more common-looking – the everyday pessimistic man of the twenty-first century – why have some of the constraining formal aspects that verse drama dictates been kept? While it might sound indeed an inadequate match, contemporary playwrights like Ives have claimed that this is precisely what makes play-rewriting worthwhile:

The problem with naturalistic dialogue (…) is the problem with Eugene O’Neill: The words aren’t interesting, only the emotional current within them. Verse is more concentrated, more pleasurable than naturalism. (…) If the emotional current is the same, the verse adds something more: puns, music and intensified feelings. I’ve never been interested in theatrical realism, which is just seeing what you see every day in life. You have to get beyond the bounds of what you already know. (Ives in Himes. My emphasis.)

As Ives states, writing drama in verse does not mean that the theme is not contemporary. Neither is the play contemporary because it is adapted to our modern concerns. What makes Molière still contemporary and the source of theatrical creativity, not only through the mise en scène but also through rewriting and adaptation, is that both the language and the topoï are witty enough to be meaningful ever.

Finally we should wonder where such theatrical form – i.e. a French classic recomposed in Shakespeare’s tongue – is situated within the British theatrical landscape. When Crimp reinvented Molière in the nineteen-nineties the space was mostly occupied by authors such as Sarah Kane, Howard Barker, Tom Stoppard or Edward Bond to name but a few. Crimp himself represented this trend of controversial and political drama attacking the new consumerism that had been encouraged by Thatcher in the previous decad.10 Since then there had been a call for a radical aesthetics in theatre making where the artist would rework (“reforge”) language itself, “investing it with new myths […].” (Howard: 134)

In this cultural context the plurality of new adaptations of Molière’s plays for the Anglophone venues may have seemed paradoxical first although it also reflected the need of our society to maintain an entertaining and poetic drama that could acknowledge the past while not ignoring the present with its vices and virtues. Contemporary playwrights may have found their inspiration in Molière’s works but they have also offered their own plays, in keeping with the taste and fashion of their time. Today Molière is neither copied, nor plagiarized. Much to the contrary. The reinvention of his plays is a way to make them outlive fashions, as Gilles Deleuze declares in his analysis on the motifs of difference and repetition: “the [repetition] is the universality of the singular”11 (Deleuze: 8), which implies that the translations, adaptations and “translaptations” of our French classics vouch for their influence worldwide more than for their dis-location and deformation.