Lochhead Thon Man Molière

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78001-931-4
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 112 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Modern Plays

'Why do folk not, ever, catch on to themselves?... Ach, gies you another interesting nutter to play.' Welcome to Paris at the time of Louis XIV. Come backstage and meet the King's theatre company - a troupe of grandes dames, old hams, ingénues and, of course, their leading man, author of their dramas and cause of all their troubles... thon man Molière. Under constant threat of debtors' prison, in big bother with church and state and - worst of all - disastrously in love, Molière writes brilliant, scurrilous comedies inspired by a desperate life. But telling the truth is a dangerous business and his latest drama could be the death of him... Liz Lochhead's play Thon Man Molière was first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016, in a production starring Jimmy Chisholm and Siobhan Redmond. 'I was so moved by this play, which surprised me, as I had expected a knockabout comedy. Don't get me wrong, it was funny. But I hadn't expected the tenderness and emotional complexity. The bond - eternal, exasperated, essential - between Molière and Madeleine is the core of the piece, but all of these characters seem every bit as human and deep and strange and needy as theatre people always are.' David Greig, Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her original stage plays include Thon Man Molière, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone). Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the 2023 Saltire Society  Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Scottish literature .

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lochhead, Liz

Leseproben

Introduction

Liz Lochhead

Thon Man Molière: or Whit Got Him Intae Aw That Bother is about one of my great theatrical heroes. It was informed and inspired by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Life of Monsieur de Molière, his meticulously researched but very personal, very vivid, take on the man. It was written in 1932 but not published until 1962, more than twenty years after its author’s death, for, under Stalin, Bulgakov’s Molière biog, like most of his plays and novels, was met with perilous disapproval and banned by the Soviet authorities, detecting parallels being drawn between Molière and Bulgakov himself, judging it unacceptably riddled with veiled criticisms of their own repressive post-revolutionary society and times.

It must be at least a dozen years or so ago that a copy of this Bulgakov biography was given to me by my great friend, the master of the short-story, Helen Simpson, saying she felt I was going to some time write a play about Molière. I found it a really great read, vivid as any novel, but didn’t see anything in her prediction. It was years later I was struck suddenly by the parallel between Molière and our contemporary artist in comedy, Woody Allen, and the scandal that ensued when Mia Farrow found those infamous Polaroid photographs taken by Allen of her adopted daughter, Soon Yi. Shame there wasn’t such a thing as photography in Molière’s time…

Then I thought: ‘Ah, but I think I know exactly how to get around that!’ From then on I had a scene, once I had a scene that was it. I was writing this play.

Madeleine Béjart and young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière were briefly lovers. Then partners in their mutual, vital, lifelong passion, the crazy project of running their own theatre company, remaining tied in a bond that was more-than-a-marriage for the rest of their lives.

Nevertheless, in late middle-age, all of a sudden Molière did marry. And this marriage was to someone young enough to be his daughter, the stage-struck seventeen-year-old Armande Béjart. Who – according to elaborately falsified birth certificates no one seems to have really believed for one moment – was Madeleine’s little sister.

This Armande, nicknamed Menou, was in fact Madeleine’s daughter, and all the world knew it. Gossip had it her father was one Esprit de Raimond de Mormoiron, Comte de Modène, a nobleman with whom Madeleine most certainly had an affair, and a son.

Was he Menou’s father? We’ll never know.

While Molière was in favour with the Court, the falsified birth certificates sufficed. If the King said so, then all the world accepted the truth that Menou was Madeleine’s (albeit unlikely) sister. But the distribution of favour, power and patronage is fickle and arbitrary – no one knew that better than Molière (and Bulgakov?). Once Molière had cultivated some enemies – he had lots of enemies, you could not be so popular or audacious a writer as he and not have enemies – then, just waiting, ready to be viciously, maliciously, used against him by those out to ruin him, were these rumours, accusations of having broken the biggest taboo, and having committed the worst crime, incest.

Let’s rewind to Molière’s beginnings. Poor old Monsieur Poquelin! Upholsterer by Royal Appointment to Louis XIV of France, his twenty-year-old son, Jean-Baptiste, was a great disappointment to him. He’d shown no interest whatsoever in the family trade; indeed, since his early teens had wasted all his time and his father’s money in pursuit of the rough and magical theatre life of the Pont Neuf among the shysters and the snake-oil salesmen and the mountebanks and the players.

Then, after an expensive education at the University of Orléans his father had paid through the nose for, just when the boy was finally coming out for a lawyer, did he not – what a cliché – have to fall for an actress? Worse still, beautiful, red-haired and four years his senior, this Madeleine Béjart has persuaded the daft lad to set up a two-sous theatre company with a handful of her rackety relatives from her tribe of troupers – real pros, the Béjart clan, a talented if ragbag theatrical dynasty. Young Poquelin ran away with this circus and, just as his father feared, never looked back. Even added insult to injury and changed his name to Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière.

Dad Poquelin was just furious. He didn’t realise this ‘Molière’, was destined to become one of the world’s very greatest comic playwrights, the comedy-drama of his own life ending with him – while playing the lead role in his new play Le Malade Imaginaire, aka The Hypochondriac — being taken mortally ill and collapsing on stage (whilst, taking it for merely a hilarious part of the action, the audience laughed and laughed as Molière was dying). He was buried in unconsecrated ground, as befitted a disreputable member of a degenerate profession.

If the twenty-year-old Jean-Baptiste Poquelin hadn’t been so smitten by Madeleine, might he have made a brilliant advocate, with his gift for articulating an argument to its baroque conclusion and beyond? No, seems he was stuck from the start with the dramatist’s imperative – to put both sides of it.

As a wee boy, Jean-Baptiste had discovered that not only did he have an acute talent for mimicking his mother’s priest, but also what a most satisfactory hullabaloo this caused, with his father involuntarily in stitches and even his devout mother deliciously torn between hilarity and disapproval.

It was all laid out in front of him from that moment on. His harlequin-chequered life of ironies, of ups and downs, successes and failures, of Paris and the provinces, of plaudits and penury, of patronage lavished and patronage brutally and arbitrarily withdrawn; works written, rewritten, works alternately fêted and banned, fought for, forbidden again – like his masterpiece Tartuffe, so despised and rejected before suddenly, out of the blue, the ban being revoked and it being given a swish production ordered by the King – his private life lived all-too-publicly, that life of forbidden love, of purple scandals and painful cuckoldings, that life of accusations. Blasphemy! Incest!

I constantly marvel at Molière’s – what, bravery? blindness? emotionally opportunistic cold-eyed pragmaticism? – because, while suffering genuinely and terribly over young Menou’s infidelities – she was apparently pathologically unfaithful and the model for the delicious, wicked, faithless Célimène in The Misanthrope – he was also able, in School for Wives, to ridicule old Arnolphe’s foolish passion for a girl far, far, too young for him and who loved him not a jot – as neither she should. I am boggled by how real personal anguish was regularly turned into absolute hilarity for others to laugh at.

Molière and Madeleine’s company were initially influenced by the Italian Players. The great Scaramouche taught him all he knew, and something of the folk art of the commedia dell’arte and its stock comic masks remains within his all-too-human and real unique eccentrics. Every one of his characters is at once a perfect type and also a unique and absolutely live-and-kicking human being suffused with that particular individual’s peculiar mania. Each is a slave to some obsession which, pursued to the nth degree as it damn well always is, only serves to bring about the thing each protagonist most deeply fears.

All the comic energy, all the sympathy, is always with this mad protagonist. There is always in a Molière play an honnête homme, a character advocating, often comically ad infinitum, simple common sense. Which never does prevail. When, often via a ‘deus ex machina’, a happy ending out of nowhere, we get that sudden reversal to the ideal order of things, it is always quite ironically, even cynically, deadpanned as not bloody likely.

A lack of any sense of proportion whatsoever mars the psyche of all of his protagonists, yet there’s a complexity and mystery at the heart of each compulsion. Why does Orgon need to believe in the conman Tartuffe? Why would a slave to the truth, an absolute anti-liar like Alceste in The Misanthrope, fall in love with Célimène and her cheating ways? What on earth makes old-man Arnolphe in School for Wives, in the face of all the evidence constantly confirming Agnes’s deep and passionate love for her proper young man Horace, believe he can actually bully her into loving him?

We do not know why these things are so, but, hey, life is like that. Molière is one of the very greatest comic playwrights the world has ever known. One ‘whose plays are universal in their application yet untranslatable’, according to a snooty contributor to The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, deploring the fact that, ‘In translation the wit evaporates and only a skeleton plot is left. This, however, will not deter people from trying.’

Scots playwrights more than most, have long been guilty of this supposedly foolhardy exercise. Had I known about Scotland’s Molière tradition at the time – or indeed anything about Molière – would...