SOURCE: “‘Don Juan,’ 1665-1925,” in Molière: Don Juan, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-17.

[In this excerpt, Whitton reviews the performance history of Don Juan, one of Molière's more challenging comedies from an interpretive standpoint. For Whitton, the servant character of Sganarelle is a crucial factor in interpreting the play and its ambiguous main character for modern audiences.]

Tales about statues of the dead coming to life to exact retribution from the living were endemic in medieval folk legend, and in literature stretching back to antiquity. But the fusion of the Stone Guest motif with the story of an unrepentant womaniser first appeared in Spain in 1630. Written by a monk, Tirso de Molina, The Joker of Seville and the Guest of Stone recounts the life of Don Juan Tenorio, whose adventures are punished when the statue of a Commander whom he had killed, and whose daughter he has tried to seduce, invites him to supper and drags him down to Hell. This cautionary tale, despite its pious intentions, is actually a much more exciting play than it sounds, as a recent production by the Royal Shakespeare Company proved.¹ In addition to its sensational story, the play broaches two major themes which, at the emergence of the modern world, were starting to take a grip on Western consciousness: the clash between the rationalist mind and phenomena which transcend the material world, and the tension between the individual ego and the moral restraints of society. Unwittingly, Tirso had created a mythical archetype which has inspired innumerable poets, playwrights, novelists and composers.

From Spain, the story quickly passed to Italy, and from there to France. Giliberto's The Guest of Stone (1652) is now lost, but another play of the same name, attributed to Cicognini, inspired versions by the French playwrights Dorimon (1658) and Villiers (1659). During the course of its transmission, the story acquired an increasingly comic or tragi-comic complexion. In the process, the figure of the servant Catalinón assumed growing importance as a counter-weight to Don Juan. The story was becoming that of a couple, with the servant (Molière's Sganarelle, Mozart's Leporello) having equal dramatic status to the master. In addition, the focus was shifting from the moral lesson to the central character's motivation, thus laying the groundwork for the emergence of Don Juan as a modern psychological type rather than Tirso's morality-play Everyman. The story, meanwhile, had also been absorbed into the repertoire of commedia dell'arte where it became a subject of farce, and this gave it a second line of transmission to France. One scenario by Biancolelli, a popular Harlequin, was being performed in Paris in the early 1660s. At about the same time the Italian Players, with whom Molière was then sharing the Petit-Bourbon theatre, were performing their own version.

What attracted Molière to the story was doubtless its proven box-office appeal. The latter was always a crucial consideration to the playwright and actor-manager, but especially so in 1664-5 when he wrote Don Juan. For three years he had been fighting off attacks from the coalition of churchmen, prudes and theatrical rivals whose enmity had been aroused by the phenomenenal success in 1662 of School for Wives. In May 1664 he suffered a serious blow at the hands of the Company of Jesus with the suppression of Tartuffe after only a single performance at Versailles. The need for a new play to revive the repertoire must have been very pressing. But the loss of Tartuffe was clearly more than a financial set-back. The tenacity with which he waged his five-year struggle to get the ban lifted suggests that for Molière it was, above all, a moral issue. What was at stake was his survival as an artist who asserted the right of comedy to be serious, that is to treat the burning social and philosophical issues of his time. In this perspective the full extent of Molière's boldness in writing Don Juan becomes apparent. Faced with calls from the highest religious authorities for his elimination, he chose to riposte not with a safe and innocuous comedy but with a work which was, if anything, more audacious than Tartuffe.

Molière's Don Juan is not a simple re-telling of the story but an original play adapted to the manners and ideas of his time. Ostensibly the action is set in Sicily but contemporaries would easily recognise in Don Juan the portrait of an emancipated French nobleman of the mid-seventeenth century. Depicting a gallery of contemporary social types, the play functions at one level as a comedy of manners. At another level, in keeping with the classical interest in human nature, it becomes a portrait of an individual. Molière transfers the interest from the Don's sexual exploits, which are reduced to illustrative incidents, to his psychology. He endows him with a powerful intellect and allows him to justify his actions in terms of a systematic programme of rational free-thinking. Don Juan, unlike his real-life counterparts who dabbled in Epicurianism and materialistic scepticism, may simply be using his professed philosophy as a convenient cloak for a selfish way of life. But by treating the subject at the level of philosophical debate, Molière makes the play into a provocative blend of social satire and metaphysical speculation. Another major contribution to the legend was to make Sganarelle Don Juan's close confidant. More than a comic foil, his real dramatic function—which directors ignore at their peril—is to break through the master's monstrous inaccessibility and to reveal Don Juan to the audience.

We may take it for granted that a play should be judged on its own terms, by what it is rather than what it is not. But to understand why Don Juan was for so long consigned to neglect, one needs to recognise that in terms of the formal rules of French classical dramaturgy it is a highly unorthodox masterpiece. It is written in prose rather than verse; it defies the three unities of place, time and action; instead of a single plot there are three strands to the intrigue (the pursuit of Don Juan by his wronged wife Elvire and her three brothers; Don Juan's amorous pursuit of the peasant women; the unrelated episode of the Commander who returns from Don Juan's past to inflict retribution). The plot is episodic, with a sequence of sometimes unrelated characters and scenes, the exposition is incomplete, and some actions are initiated inconclusively. Disconcertingly, Molière also confounds the classical convention by mixing dramatic genres: neither comedy nor tragedy, the play is a tragi-comedy in which broad farce is juxtaposed with semi-serious discussion of weighty moral and philosophical issues. It is these non-classical qualities (sometimes described as ‘Shakespearean’), that condemned Don Juan to its status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a chaotically incoherent work—and, conversely, have helped to make its appeal irresistible to modern directors and audiences.

Critics have often felt compelled to explain the play's irregularities in terms of the supposed haste with which it was written. In fact, recent evidence shows that Molière composed it over a rather longer period than was formerly imagined. In any case, rather than seeking explanations for allegedly defective craftsmanship, it seems more profitable to enquire what artistic principles govern its composition.

Beneath an apparently erratic action there lies, in fact, a deep structural unity. Briefly, the action is constructed around a pivotal point between the third and fourth acts. The first three acts depict Don Juan in a series of adventures, eluding Elvire and her brothers while all the time pursuing whatever objects of interest present themselves to him (a passing flirtation with peasant women, an entanglement with brigands, a moral duel with a hermit). All these episodes are introduced as illustrations of the libertine's way of life, the reasons for which are illuminated, meanwhile, in a series of philosophical discussions with Sganarelle. The fact that each act, contrary to classical convention, has a different setting, is intrinsic to the play's meaning, as too is the fact that each location is out of doors. At a symbolic level, the discontinuity of the action and the topographical variety express Don Juan's relationship with the world. The spectator watches the libertine roaming freely, irresponsibly and with seeming impunity, through the world of others. At the very end of the third act the play takes a leap into the supernatural with the first appearance of the Commander, suggesting that there may be more to the world than Don Juan's materialistic philosophy allows. The last two acts, in contrast to the first three, show the net closing in and for that reason are markedly less episodic. The fourth act switches to an interior setting—a significant change since the central character is no longer seen as an unhindered free spirit. A now immobile Don Juan is being visited by a succession of creditors, literal and metaphorical, each of whom delivers a request, which is denied, and a warning, which is tossed aside. They present themselves in a sequence that reflects the increasing gravity of their mission: the tradesman (money), the father (family honour), the wife (Christian duty), the Commander (perdition). Don Juan's refusal to heed their demands invokes a process of retribution, which the final act executes. First, as in all classical tragedies and comedies, there is a scene where the onward rush of events is suspended: in one final escapade Don Juan, assuming the mask of a religious hypocrite, enjoys what the spectators now sense is only an illusion of impunity; from then on, the action accelerates towards its ordained conclusion. Described thus, the play is anything but chaotic. Certainly, directors who have approached it on its own terms have found in it a perfectly coherent, implacable, artistic logic.

What these actions signify in ethical and social terms is, however, altogether more problematic. Of all Molière's plays, Don Juan poses the greatest interpretative difficulties. This is partly because the central character himself appears to be a paradoxical mixture of positive and negative qualities. If the abusive treatment of his servant, wife, father and chance acquaintances is reprehensible, there is something admirable, to the modern mind, in his intellectual emancipation and defiance of authority. Is he a progressive thinker ripping off the mask of conventional morality or a ruthless, unscrupulous egoist? When, confronted with the miraculous apparition that will kill him, he refutes the evidence of his eyes and reaffirms his rationalist beliefs, should this be seen as intellectual courage or foolish obduracy? The comedy in the play offers few pointers to how we should evaluate him—indeed, it compounds the ambiguity of Don Juan as a character. In satire, laughter generally serves to direct criticism. In Don Juan, however, we invariably laugh with Don Juan at his victims, producing an unusual and unsettling antithesis between the play's comic structure and its moral structure. While condemning his conduct, we are invited to admire the effortless superiority with which he despatches his opponents' arguments.

Since Don Juan is a professed atheist, the absence of any character who can effectively oppose him is no trivial matter. Molière uses the intimate master-servant relationship as the platform for a religious debate. But the way the debate is conducted is heavily loaded, with only a credulous and superstitious valet to oppose the master's superior intelligence. Ostensibly, the debate is ultimately resolved by a higher agent. The ending, in which the Statue takes Don Juan to Hell, appears finally to give the lie to his rationalism and to satisfy the moralists' desire to see the sinner punished. In practice it does nothing of the sort, as Molière's enemies instantly realised. The recourse to an arbitrary deus ex machina robs the ending of its plausibility and the play of any clear moral lesson. Sganarelle's final comments pay lip service to conventional morality:

Now he's dead and everyone's satisfied—the Heaven he offended, the laws he broke, the families he disgraced, the parents he outraged, the wives he perverted, the husbands he destroyed.

But even these platitudes are devalued by the bathetic final cry: ‘My wages, what about my wages?’

For the playwright, Don Juan may have been less enigmatic than he appears to us. Molière is known to have associated with genuine free-thinkers, and it is more than possible that he sympathised with their progressive attitudes. But to conclude from this that he sympathised with Don Juan, or intended him as his spokesman in the expression of rationalist ideas, seems very dubious. The most likely explanation (though this can only be a matter for speculation) is that he wished to show an aristocratic egoist who adopts the arguments of a free-thinker to justify his socially irresponsible behaviour. If we strip the play of its obfuscating religious debate, the central idea as Molière conceived it may be the demonstration of Sganarelle's famous statement in the opening scene that ‘a wicked nobleman is a terrible thing’. The increasingly heroic perceptions of Don Juan as an enlightened thinker, a scourge of petty-minded moralists, or as a God-defying figure like Faust, would then reflect the preoccupations of later generations less involved in the social reality that Molière was dealing with.

This is not in the least to suggest that other interpretations are ‘wrong’. Works of the past only live in the present insofar as they are constantly re-interpreted in terms which are relevant to the spectators' own experience. And whatever Molière really felt about Don Juan, he created a disconcertingly ambivalent figure. The action raises questions to which the dénouement supplies a formal solution but no satisfactory answers, because none is realistically possible. Ultimately, what guarantees the play its enduring fascination is precisely that it is not a demonstration of a moral theorem but an exploration of problems to which no simple solutions are forthcoming.

THE PLAY'S PREMIèRE

One practical consequence of Molière's desire to capitalise on the theatrical vogue of Don Juan was the requirement for a more elaborate form of staging than the single stage setting in which most of his comedies, written to conform to the classical unity of place, were performed. Don Juan belongs to a different contemporary genre, that of the machine-play. Spectacular stage effects were a feature of productions at the rival Marais theatre and of the court entertainments to which Molière contributed, but they were a new departure for the playwright's Palais-Royal theatre—so new, in fact, that he took the unusual step of commissioning special sets from stage decorators. In the absence of any surviving visual evidence, it is the recently discovered contract for the sets that provides the best information we have about how the play was staged.

Molière ordered a series of six trompe-l'œil perspective sets, one for each of the five acts, plus a transformation effect during the third act. The first act required: ‘a palace comprising five wings on each side and a façade at the rear, the first wings being eighteen pieds high and the others diminishing in perspective’. To give added depth to the picture, the backcloth had a cut-out which opened on to ‘two smaller wings depicting a garden, and a distant perspective’. In the second act, the architectural perspective was replaced by a country scene consisting of five pairs of wings with a backdrop representing a grotto and, again, a cut-out, this time framing a seascape. The third act, where the supernatural makes its first appearance, was fittingly the most spectacular. It began with a shallow stage—three pairs of wings representing a forest—and was enclosed at the rear with a wall painted to represent a temple. Towards the end of the act Don Juan notices the temple and, on being told by Sganarelle that it is the Commander's tomb, decides to enter it. Here the text contains the stage direction: ‘the tomb opens to reveal a superb mausoleum and the Commander's statue’. This implies that the back wall was drawn apart to reveal a further scene beyond. In reality, something more elaborate than a revelation scene must have occurred, because the fifth setting was: ‘the interior of a temple, comprising five sets of wings, the first eighteen pieds high and the others diminishing in perspective, and a closed wall representing the back of the temple’. As this makes clear, there was a full transformation effect, with one complete setting being replaced by an entirely new one. While the upstage wall was drawn apart to reveal the deepest interior of the tomb, the forest simultaneously disappeared into the wings to be replaced by the monumental marble of the tomb, whilst new overhead borders (also specified in the contract) were flown in to replace the sky borders of the previous scene. After a more modest, fully enclosed interior representing Don Juan's apartment in the fourth act, the fifth-act setting gave a grand finale: ‘a town, comprising five wings on each side … and at the back a painted town gate, with two smaller wings and a perspective beyond’. From these specifications together with the constume inventory it is clear that great attention (and considerable expense—nine hundred livres for the sets) was devoted to making the production visually very impressive.

In this connection, a curious feature of the play is the way the dialogue refers, quite insistently, to the settings in which the characters find themselves. In the first act Sganarelle indicates his master to Gusman with the words: ‘Look, there he is, walking in this palace.’ In the second act Don Juan greets Charlotte by saying: ‘Good heavens! Are there really delicious creatures like you to be found in this countryside, amongst these trees and rocks?’ From a utilitarian point of view the specific details are superfluous, serving only to draw attention to something that the spectators can already see for themselves. Again, in Act III, when Don Juan and Sganarelle enter the temple, the latter exclaims: ‘Oh, isn't it beautiful! The statues! Oh, the beautiful marble, and those pillars!’ These repeated references to location clearly must have interacted with the staging to affect the audience's experience of the play, and have led some critics to speak of a deliberate Brechtian alienation effect. This seems to me, however, to be a misunderstanding of baroque illusion, which never aspired to be a ‘real’ deception; the pleasure came rather from the spectator's knowing complicity in the illusion. Rather than trying to ‘break’ an illusion which was only ever a deception of the senses, not of the understanding, Molière was offering a comic version of it. Coming from the mouth of the credulous Sganarelle—the only person in the theatre apparently taken in by the illusion—the admiring comments on painted stage props can only have provoked laughter. Molière seems, in fact, to have succeeded in having it both ways: showing that he could produce stage effects to rival those of the Marais company, whilst enhancing the spectators' enjoyment of them by nudging references to their staginess. This is not to say that the humour is entirely innocent. Its subversive potential becomes clear with Sganarelle's demonstration of God's existence by the design argument. ‘I should like to know’, he asks, ‘who made those trees, those rocks, this ground we are standing on, and that sky up there. Did it all create itself?’ Sganarelle's gestures to painted cardboard and canvas made an obvious mockery of his proof of divine purpose.

The role of Don Juan was played by La Grange, the most dependable and faithful of Molière's actors. The costume he wore is described for us by Sganarelle. With a tightly-curled blond wig, feathered hat, gold threads in his coat and flame-coloured ribbons, he was the last word in elegance and high fashion. No contemporary account of his performance as Don Juan has been found, but his qualities as an actor are well known: he was ‘good-looking, with an easy manner, natural and relaxed’ (Chappuzeau). With such urbane and attractive qualities, he was the ideal interpreter of his habitual role in Molière's comedies: that of the sincere young lover. In entrusting the part to La Grange, Molière was clearly not intent on blackening his hero. He may have been blasé, with the cynicism not uncommon among sophisticated courtiers of the period, but it is impossible to imagine that his Don Juan had any of the mythic dimensions, whether satanic or Promethean, that the role acquired in later centuries. All the evidence points to a more realistic portrayal of a social type—the irresponsible nobleman—whose youth (La Grange was twenty-six at the time) and affable manner must have attenuated the darker side of his conduct. It is certainly notable that even the play's most vociferous critics recorded little in the way of objections to Don Juan. It was Sganarelle that they found scandalous.

Sganarelle, of course, was Molière's role. Although it goes far beyond simple farce, the role is constructed on the lines of a character from farce at which Molière, with his vigorous and highly coloured acting style, was unsurpassable. It can safely be assumed that the many lazzi and farce routines that he wrote into the part were played to the hilt, though his costume of cast-offs from his master's wardrobe (gold satin jupon, cotton camisole with gold decorations, and satin doublet with flower motifs) suggests that something more realistic than the conventional valet of farce was aimed at. Again, there is no direct evidence of how Molière performed the role, but an idea of it can be inferred from the impression it produced on contemporaries. Rochemont's polemical blast was directed mainly against the ‘valet [who is] even more impious than the master’. Molière, he said, depicts ‘a fool who makes grotesque speeches about God and undermines his arguments with a deliberate pratfall’.² For the Prince de Conti, similarly, the real scandal was not the atheist master but that the fact that the playwright ‘entrusts God's cause to a valet and, in order to defend Him, makes him say all sorts of inanities’.³ Conti especially criticised the way Molière, by his comic acting in the final scene, ridiculed the edifying lesson of Don Juan's horrible end. Rochemont adds the intriguing detail that ‘the thunder makes the valet laugh’.

The production opened on 15 February 1665. Audience figures and box-office receipts were high (the takings for the fifth performance were amongst the highest recorded in the period) and remained solid for the duration of the first run. But the play immediately ran into opposition from the Cabal. ‘All Paris is talking about Molière's crime’ began one anonymous sonnet that was circulated in the salons. To save his play Molière offered concessions: by the second performance (17 February) a number of controversial lines had been cut, and the scene where Don Juan tempts a Beggar with money on condition that he blasphemes was removed in its entirety. Evidently these changes did not satisfy the Cabal, since the polemic continued to rage for some months. But the exact reasons for what happened next remain a matter for conjecture. What is known is that on 20 March the theatres closed for Lent and when they reopened Don Juan had been withdrawn from the repertoire.

No one has succeeded in explaining its abrupt disappearance. It is commonly thought to have been withdrawn as a result of pressure brought to bear on Molière by the devout set close to the King, though no documentary evidence survives to prove the theory. Nor, in fact, is there anything to suggest that the pleasure-loving Louis XIV disapproved of the play personally. On the contrary, four months later he officially extended his patronage and protection to Molière's company, which took the title of King's Players (Troupe du Roi au Palais-Royal). Perhaps, then, it had been intimated to Molière that a reward would be forthcoming if he exercised discretion over Don Juan. Alternatively, it may be that Molière's priority was to rescue Tartuffe, which was still banned, and that he chose to sacrifice Don Juan in the interests of winning the long-term battle over Tartuffe. But one can be sure that Molière would not have taken a lucrative play off the bill without good reason. Clearly, whatever the mechanism involved, the opposition had somehow forced the play's withdrawal. Even then, their anger was not placated. The controversy raged on over the following months, during which Molière was accused of mounting a deliberate attack on organised religion by exposing piety to ridicule and defying heaven's vengeance by means of ‘ridiculous fireworks’. The ferocity of these pamphlets offers a telling record of the anti-theatrical climate into which Molière ventured to pitch his play.

‘DON JUAN’ ON STAGE, 1665-1925

Molière never performed Don Juan again, nor was it published during his lifetime.⁴ In 1677, four years after his death, his widow Madeleine Béjart commissioned from Thomas Corneille an adaptation which became a popular play. Corneille ‘improved’ the play from a literary point of view by versifying it, and introduced a number of new characters. In something of an understatement he also said he had ‘softened certain passages which had offended sensitive people’. The Beggar scene was eliminated, the discussion of Don Juan's beliefs likewise, and the re-written ending became a straightforward warning to others. The new play ended with Sganarelle saying: ‘The earth has swallowed him up! I will hasten to become a hermit. All scoundrels will be filled with dismay by this warning example. Woe to him who sees it and does not profit from it.’ In this emasculated form Don Juan was rendered acceptable. It was played twenty-six times by Molière's company, and more than five hundred times by the Comédie-Française (created in 1680 by a merger of the playwright's company with the Hôtel de Bourgogne) during the next century and a half. But it was not Molière's play.

Throughout the eighteenth century, which saw the appearance of another Don Juan masterpiece in Da Ponte's and Mozart's Don Giovanni, Don Juan was considered unworthy of inclusion in the canon of Molière's great comedies. The later Romantic period saw the start of a critical revaluation with writers like Musset and Gautier showing renewed interest in the work. Their interest was literary rather than theatrical and their reading, inevitably, was coloured by Romantic manifestions of Don Juan, especially those of Hoffmann (which had an enormous impact in France following its publication in French in 1829) and Byron. In 1841, however, Robert Kemp, the young actor-director of the Odéon theatre, conceived the notion of producing Molière's original Don Juan. The idea was a bold one which challenged both the low esteem in which the play was held and the Comédie-Française's presumed monopoly on Molière. There were ten performances, with Kemp in the title role. Since the highlight of the production was the appearance of the actor Barré in the minor role of Pierrot, they can have contributed little to a revised understanding of the play. Seven years later, however, spurred on by Kemp's initiative, the Comédie-Française mounted its first production of Molière's Don Juan (15 January 1847).

The first appearance of any play in the Comédie-Française's repertoire is always vested with symbolic importance. The restoration of Don Juan, timed to celebrate the two hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the playwright's birth, was no exception. A contemporary gazette heralded ‘a Don Juan freed from suppressions and modifications’, promised ‘a spectacular dénouement in conformity with the author's intentions’, and advised its readers that ‘boxes and stalls are being booked as if they are being given away free’.⁵

It was, indeed, a lavish production with magnificent period costumes created by Achille Devéria and five settings painted by the celebrated stage decorator Ciceri. The contemporary tendency towards scenic realism is evident in both sets and costumes, giving an effect which is impressive but somewhat heavy and (by today's values) lacking in poetry. Rather unusually, the first-act setting was the interior of a palace, fully furnished in Louis XIV style, and with double windows opening on to a terrace and garden. The fourth act, showing a furnished apartment resplendent in red and gold, was similarly replete with naturalistic detail down to a fully-laid table of plates, glasses, and cutlery. Ciceri was a master of stage machinery, and the special effects of Statue, spectral figures, trapdoors, flames and smoke, were produced with particular brilliance. No contradiction was apparently perceived between the realism of the scenery and the miraculous effects.

In the two principal roles neither performer was entirely happy. Geffroy, the actor playing Don Juan, was celebrated for his success in Romantic dramas but on this occasion his ‘sombre, fateful physiognomy’ (Hugo) was badly suited to the role. His performance did not correspond to the public's preconceived image of a Casanova-like seducer and, not suprisingly, was thought to lack charm and wit. As for the servant, he was interpreted by Samson who had been playing Sganarelle in the Thomas Corneille version since the 1820s. In a period when declamatory performance was commonplace, he was famous for his measured, understated acting. Inevitably, this resulted in a Sganarelle who offered insufficient contrast to Don Juan and made little impact in itself—indeed, the role was virtually eclipsed in this production. Plaudits went instead to Régnier's infinitely more animated Pierrot, to Mme Volnys, whose Elvire was praised for her natural, gracious manner, and above all to the grand veteran Ligier whose moving performance as the Beggar was judged the high point of the production!

There were further sporadic revivals between 1847 and 1876. Rather than being new productions, these re-used the set and prompt book of Régnier's 1847 staging, as was the practice at the time. Unquestionably the most striking Don Juan of this period was Bressant who replaced Geffroy in 1858. Bressant was as charming and seductive as Geffroy was brooding and ungracious. According to a contemporary, he was ‘the most elegant Don Juan one can imagine. His costumes are delicious; he wears them exquisitely; he comes and goes with perfect ease.’⁶ It was a brilliant but one-dimensional portrait of a consummate seducer.

After these tentative revivals in the middle decades of the century, none of which succeeded in wresting Molière from the Romantic tradition, the play returned once more to obscurity. Forty years elapsed before the Comédie-Française's next unhappy attempt to revive it (15 January 1917). The role of Don Juan fell to the veteran actor Rafaël Duflos who also directed the production. Duflos wrote that he considered the part one of the heaviest and least rewarding in the repertoire and made no secret of the fact that he accepted it only out of a sense of duty⁷—and it showed. He gave the impression of an aged, tired actor impersonating an aged, tired Don Juan. Critics were unanimous in their condemnation: ‘M. Duflos wears his beautiful costumes with style, but it's not enough … From start to finish he is bored, and he bores us.’⁸ Georges Berr, a popular actor of the old school, played Sganarelle as a stereotypical comic servant. As with Duflos, there was no exploration of the role: ‘M. Berr seems to imagine that this incarnation of the people is merely a repertoire valet like any other. And he plays the part with all his stock-in-trade mannerisms. It is an odious spectacle.’⁹

The production had a more favourable reception when it was revived in 1922 (and again, for Molière's tricentenary celebration, in 1925) with Maurice Escande replacing Duflos as Don Juan. Escande rejuvenated the role without suggesting any hidden depths beneath the seducer's charming exterior. But cast changes could not disguise the void of interpretation in what were, at bottom, perfunctory gestures which the Comédie-Française felt obliged to make periodically. The real problem was lack of belief in the play. Eighty years of half-hearted experiment had done little to overturn the received opinion that Don Juan was a hastily-written, flawed text which could not be made to work on the stage. Nor was there any sense that it might have anything relevant to say to modern audiences. The game was given away by a critic who wrote in 1917: ‘Performances of Molière's Don Juan are mounted out of love of literature rather than for theatrical pleasure. It may not be a bad play, but it's an unfinished work and unsatisfying in performance.’¹⁰

There was, however, one man of the theatre who was convinced that Don Juan had more to offer than the current lazy, convention-bound productions of the time suggested. Jacques Copeau, whose productions of Molière at the Vieux-Colombier were as fresh and original as those of the Comédie-Française were stale and conventional, witnessed the anniversary performance in the Salle Richelieu on 15 January 1917. Recording his impressions in his Journal that night, he wrote indignantly about the pretentious, meaningless sets, the musical interludes, the overblown operatic staging and the vacuity of interpretation:

In the second act, more music, then curtain up. Some little dancers perform a dance, sing, form a chain, disappear, whereupon, amidst an utterly pointless crowd of peasants, Charlotte and Pierrot appear and finally embark on their dialogue. And so it continues. The fourth act (the supper) involves another elaborate entertainment. People dressed in floating gauze mill around Don Juan, pour him drinks, brush roses against his head. In the middle of this Folies-Bergères show we have the Italian interlude of Sganarelle with the little lackey, acted timidly and without any warmth. The last act begins with a funereal chant and a cortege of hooded capucin monks … The whole thing is stupid and hideous.

Then Copeau gives a tantalising glimpse of his own vision of Molière:

I am describing only what is redundant. It would take all day to talk about what is lacking. What is absent is simplicity and truth, everything that springs from a proper understanding of the text and an imaginative staging of it.¹¹

He concludes: ‘My mind is made up. I will include Don Juan in the Vieux-Colombier's next season.’ Sadly, the production, which he had apparently been projecting since 1913, never materialised. Thus it fell to Copeau's pupil and successor Louis Jouvet, thirty years later, to reveal Don Juan to French audiences.

Notes

1. The Last Days of Don Juan, Nick Dear, director (Stratford, 1990).

2. Sieur de Rochemont (pseud.), Observations sur une comédie de Molière intitulée le Festin de Pierre (Paris: Pépingué, 18 April 1665).

3. Prince de Conti, Traité de la comédie (Paris: 1666).

4. The posthumous edition (1682) was heavily censored. The text of the first performance has been re-constructed using editions published in Amsterdam and Brussels.

5. Le Coureur des Spectacles, 8.1.1847.

6. Paris-Théâtre, 30.4.1874.

7. Letter to Gabriel Boissy, 12.1.22. Cit. M. Descotes, Les Grands Rôles du théâtre de Molière (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), p. 72.

8. Gabriel Boissy, Comoedia, 4.1.17.

9. Ibid.

10. Ernest-Charles, Opinion, 20.1.17.

11. Jacques Copeau, Registres II: Molière (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 38-9.