SOURCE: “Reading Molière in the Theatre: Mise en Scène and the Classic Text,” in Rereading Molière: Mise en Scène from Antoine to Vitez, University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 1-23.

[In this excerpt, Carmody develops a methodology for interpreting Molière's works through the lens of twentieth-century stagings. Carmody's interest is in how these stagings address issues of historical distance and Molière's status as a classic author.]

Since the 1949 publication of Will Moore's seminal book, Molière: A New Criticism, English-speaking critics of Molière have accepted the premise that Molière's texts should be interpreted in the context of the theater. In France, René Bray's 1954 book, Molière: homme de théâtre, exerted a similar kind of influence.¹ Although Moore and Bray were pursuing very different, even fundamentally opposite, intellectual agendas, they agreed that the theatrical aspects of the plays had been far too long ignored, and that when interpreting Molière's writings, scholars should remember that Molière wrote for the theater.

As a corrective, Moore offered a reading that discussed some of Molière's major plays under such rubrics as “Mime,” “Mask,” and “Scene,” thus creating a prototype for what has come to be known as “metadramatic criticism.” Moore's readings of individual plays, however, are less sensitive to the material aspects of performance than they appear to be. Although he advocates a consideration of Molière's plays as works written for the theater, Moore is principally interested in the elucidation of Molière's morale, like those critics who precede him and whose methods he contests. In his discussion of Tartuffe, for example, Moore remarks that Molière wore a mask while performing some of his roles, then goes on to discuss Tartuffe as a play about the unmasking of Tartuffe. In the course of this discussion, Moore turns an actor's commedia mask into a metaphor without exploring the connection between Molière's use of commedia masks in performance and Moore's own description of the “unmasking” of Tartuffe, and without acknowledging that neither Molière nor the other actors wore masks during performances of Tartuffe. Instead of investigating Molière's writings as the product of a historically specific artistic and cultural practice, he devotes his attention to the philosophical issues that the critical tradition had already identified in the plays.

Rather than address the material aspects of theatrical production, Moore affirmed the importance of studying Molière's aesthetics as the best means of arriving at an appreciation of the playwright's ethics, an emphasis that encouraged scholars to turn their attention to the text itself after a long period of focusing on Molière's personal life.² The frequent, often explicit, linking in recent decades of aesthetics and ethics in the titles of books and articles on Molière indicates the extent of Moore's influence. Following his example, writers employ terms such as actor, mask, and scenic space to discuss what they take to be the ethical issues raised by Molière's dramaturgy; like Moore, they, too, never discuss actual actors, masks, or scenic spaces. For Moore and those who have adopted his methods, the language of the theater provides a range of useful metaphors that enables a metadramatic critique of a range of issues.³ It is important to note, however, that these are precisely the same issues that earlier generations of moliéristes had discussed using different vocabularies.

A recent book by Nathan Gross, one of the prominent ethics/aesthetics critics of the 1980s, reveals the extent to which the methodology pioneered by Moore continues to ignore the material aspects of performance. In From Gesture to Idea: Esthetics and Ethics in Molière's Comedy, as the title of his book implies, Gross selects “gesture” as his theatrical point of reference:

Each of these essays … develops from the observation of a specific detail of language and gesture, more apparent in a staged performance than in a reading of the printed text, into an exploration of the underlying ethical values that the play in question urges upon an audience's attention. … These gestures recur within episodes of plot arranged in parallel cycles. Organization of the dramatic text … guides the spectator's pleasurable response; it furnishes a series of contexts that allow him, by virtue of his knowledge of similar earlier incident, vocabulary, and gesture, to anticipate the comic protagonist's behavior and to appreciate ironies of situation and language.

(1-3)

Although he refers to gestures that are “more apparent in a staged performance than in a reading of the printed text,” Gross never discusses actual performances. And although the details that interest Gross could indeed be made apparent in performance, he does not take into account the very real possibility that individual directors might choose to ignore, alter, or even suppress those details.

While an individual actor may perform gestures such as those indicated by Gross, it is unlikely that any performance would provoke on the part of the spectator the kind of systematic moral reflection that Gross finds in Molière's plays. The dramatic text (synonymous here with the printed text) may guide the reader's “pleasurable response,” but the spectator is not sitting in the theater reading a book. The spectator's experience of a play is quintessentially different from that of a reader. Whereas the reader can suspend the flow of action to consider and reconsider whatever strikes his or her fancy, rereading the same passage or passages in whatever order seems most productive, the spectator can see a mise en scène only once. Whatever limited kind of “rereading” is possible in the theater, it simply cannot be the same as that which the reader takes for granted. Unlike the reader, the spectator cannot stop the performance to consider the ethical implications of a single gesture, line, exchange of lines, or sequence of events; in other words, the spectator cannot perform any of the analytical operations that Gross's reading fundamentally depends on in the time frame allowed by performance. It is useful to remember, too, that the vast majority of spectators are not professional humanists and do not pay very much attention to the kinds of ethical considerations that this kind of criticism claims to find systematically explored in these plays. This is not to say that a spectator with the angle of vision of an ethics/aesthetics critic such as Gross will not be able to discern in a certain mise en scène the very pattern he or she has already identified in the play. Clearly, there are many directors who approach Molière's text looking for precisely the kind of patterning of behavior that interests Will Moore and Nathan Gross.

I shall return to the question of Molière's morale in later chapters. What is important, for the moment, is not whether the ethics/aesthetics critics have anything of value to contribute to Molière studies (they do); what I want to contest is their claim to be dealing with Molière in the context of the theater. What Gross has to say about the repetition of gesture is valid but only in the most general, abstract way. The gestures that Gross describes are not performed by a living actor on a stage before a live audience, although Gross's discussion probably draws on unacknowledged performances that he has attended. Like other ethics/aesthetics critics, and like other scholars who adopt a metadramatic mode of commentary, Gross never addresses the question of which kind of mise en scène he has in mind. Is he thinking of a realist or nonrealist, modernist or postmodernist mise en scène? Or does he have in mind the kind of classical mise en scène that offers a judicious blend of “classical” acting values and suggestions of contemporary “relevance”? Does he, for instance, prefer Jouvet's Tartuffe or Planchon's, Vilar's Dom Juan or Chéreau's, and for what reasons? Like most literary scholars, Gross is far more comfortable citing a printed document than a theatrical performance, even though the failure to deal with actual theatrical performances calls his critical methodology into question.

It is useful to remember, however, that the work of Moore, along with that of the critics who have investigated the fields of research that he opened up, is itself determined by the discursive practices within which it emerges and which gives it its specific forms. Molière scholars such as Moore are first and foremost devoted to the humanist study of literature. Consequently, their work on the writings of Molière and on the cultural production of seventeenth-century France reflects the interests of that discipline. As a result, in their professional writings they inevitably privilege the text over theatrical performance, no matter how much they may appreciate and take pleasure in attending performances of Molière's plays. The fact that Molière scholars have, relatively speaking, almost entirely ignored the comédies-ballets (almost half of Molière's plays) for over three and a half centuries is perhaps not irrelevant in this context.

Like other ethics/aesthetics critics who take their lead from Moore, Gross avoids any discussion of the material aspects of the theater. René Bray, on the other hand, researched the working habits and environments of seventeenth-century French theater that he believed conditioned, if not actually determined, Molière's development as actor, director, company manager, and playwright. In place of detailed readings of individual plays, Bray offered what was, in effect, a revisionist historiography of French seventeenth-century theater. Bray thus opened up lines of inquiry that have led not only to significant shifts in perspective in Molière studies but also in studies of the work of other dramatists and theaters of the period.

Bray's work is perhaps less frequently quoted than Moore's for a number of reasons. In the first place, Bray offers few interpretive comments on individual plays in his Molière: homme de théâtre. (The Bray and Scherer edition of the plays, while listed in many bibliographies, is also seldom discussed.) In the second place, and more significantly, Bray undertakes a sustained assault on the humanist tradition of reading Molière as a moraliste. With considerable energy, he contends that Molière is not a systematic thinker and that no significant moral philosophy can be deduced from a reading of the plays. He devotes an entire chapter to posing the question, “Is Molière a Philosopher?” a question he answers unequivocally with a resounding “No.” Unsurprisingly, Bray's rejection of Molière as a moral philosopher made his work difficult to assimilate into discussions of the interrelationships between Molière's ethics and aesthetics. Ironically, while his work provided scholars with potentially valuable insights into the practices of the French theater industry during Molière's lifetime, none of the scholars interested in developing a “theatrical reading” of the plays has been willing to set aside his or her interest in Molière's moral philosophy.⁴ It is not surprising, therefore, that Laurence Romero, in his 1974 survey of Molière criticism, offers the disappointing assessment that Moore's and Bray's most important contribution has been that they persuaded critics to look for Molière's thought in the entire play and not simply in the speeches of the raisonneur.⁵

Bray's questioning of the kind of philosophically oriented humanistic research that has consistently informed Molière studies (the revelation and explication of Molière's moral “philosophy”) emerges as a radical break not only with almost every element of established Molière criticism but also with the humanistic discipline of dramatic criticism itself as it had been practiced until that time. (Indeed, Bray's critique of traditional Molière criticism may perhaps be seen in retrospect as being somewhat akin to poststructuralist critiques of the Author.) Bray insisted on the purely theatrical origin and destination of Molière's text. No satisfactory understanding of those texts could be arrived at, he believed, in the absence of an understanding of the signifying practices within which they emerged.

In La Formation de la doctrine classique en France, Bray made substantial contributions to our understanding of classical dramaturgy as it evolved in the real world of seventeenth-century France. Subsequently, other scholars turned their attention to the day-to-day realities of Molière's theater, notably Georges Mongrédien and Roger Herzel. In addition to his Daily Life in the Theatre at the Time of Molière, Mongrédien published in 1965 the first anthology of seventeenth-century French documents relating to Molière. Herzel produced a number of influential articles on Molière's stagecraft prior to his 1981 book, The Original Casting of Molière's Plays. Other scholars have significantly increased our understanding of seventeenth-century theater architecture and scenography.⁶ Along with Henry C. Lancaster's monumental history of French classical drama and Jacques Scherer's equally exhaustive La Dramaturgie classique en France, this research provides us with a better understanding of Molière's work as actor, director, and company manager—and how that work formed the context for his playwriting. While this research has resulted in significant gains in our understanding of the theater of Molière and his contemporaries, it has also reminded us, time and again, of how very few accounts exist of the performances of Molière's plays.

As an author, Molière was influenced as much by his director's imagination as by his actor's experience; while his experience as an actor nourished his ability to create rich, theatrical characters, his experience as a director taught him to think in terms of the interplay of character, décor, and spectator. Molière's contemporaries acknowledged him as a superbly talented and innovative director. Donneau de Visé, for example, one of the first commentators on School for Wives, complimented Molière on the degree of aesthetic control manifested in his mise en scène, remarking that Molière had set a new standard: “Never was a play so well performed with so much attention to detail; each actor knows exactly how many steps to take and every wink is measured” (qtd. in Mongrédien Recueil 1:177). While Molière's experience as a performer undoubtedly helped him create effective scenes between characters at both the moment of writing and the moment of staging, it is his directorial imagination that gave birth to the complex, hybrid form of the comédie-ballet. A mixture of different modes of theatrical performance that combines verbal, musical, scenic, and choreographic elements, the comédie-ballet demonstrates Molière's ability to think in terms of what the modern era calls the poetry of the stage.

Indeed, much of the scholarly disinterest that has greeted the comédies-ballets over the years can be attributed to the fact that Molière's texts quite obviously do not provide an adequate sense of the scenic life of these plays. Accordingly, the texts of the comédies-ballets have been relegated to the same secondary status as opera librettos or the “books” of musicals. It is hardly surprising that such creations should have been denied critical approval in the doctrinaire neo-Aristotelian climate of French neoclassicism, or that subsequent generations of scholars and theater artists should have felt embarrassed by the nonliterary (i.e., nonverbal) elements of Molière's texts. Nevertheless, the fact that Molière was capable of creating such works for the stage, often at alarmingly short notice, suggests that his theatrical imagination was directed toward creating works of theater principally at the level of performance or mise en scène. In other words, we can see Molière as the author of two quite distinct texts, the verbal text and the scenic text, only one of which has survived.

At a distance of more than three centuries, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to reconstruct Molière's original mises en scène in anything but the most fragmentary manner; it is therefore possible to propose only the most conjectural readings of Molière's writings in the context of seventeenth-century theater.⁷

Unfortunately, we know very little about the day-to-day work of seventeenth-century theater artists: we do not know how plays were rehearsed, what the acting values were, or what the production values were. What little we know about production values has been gleaned from sources such as Mahelot's Mémoire, seventeenth-century graphic reproductions of décors or scenes from a relatively small number of plays, and the manuals of scenography by experts in scenic illusion. Our information about acting styles, especially Molière's personal technique, is considerably less reliable than the documents on scenic practices, for it is based on comparisons with the extravagantly rhetorical style associated with the tragedians of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a style about which we know equally little. While Molière was praised for the “natural,” realistic quality of his acting, we should not assume that those who praised him shared our modern notions of naturalistic or realistic acting. If Molière was praised for being “natural” onstage, more “lifelike” than his tragedian colleagues at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, he was also simultaneously acknowledged as the most gifted farceur of his time, applauded for his extraordinarily flexible facial expressions and talent for grotesque silliness.⁸

If we do not possess sufficient information to discuss Molière's plays in Molière's own stagings, it is possible to consider Molière's work in the context of twentieth-century mises en scène, as many of the most influential mises en scène have been relatively well documented. Fortunately, we have not only critical accounts of the different performances but also texts written by directors and their collaborators that shed considerable light on the problematics of staging French classic drama in this century. No single book, however, can hope to discuss all of the important productions of every Molière play. Perhaps no single book can even hope to undertake a comprehensive discussion of every significant production of one of the major plays. Rather than trying to focus on the entire oeuvre or on every important production of a single play, this book focuses on productions of two plays that proved to be turning points in the twentieth-century staging of Molière's plays, The School for Wives and Tartuffe. The productions in question are André Antoine's and Jacques Arnavon's 1907 Tartuffe, Arnavon's 1936 notebook production of The School for Wives, Louis Jouvet's 1936 School for Wives, Roger Planchon's two productions of Tartuffe in the 1960s and 1970s, and Antoine Vitez's Molière tetralogy of 1978.

These productions are not, by any means, the only important Molière productions of this century, nor are the directors who staged them the only individuals who have achieved significant results with the plays in question. These productions are, however, representative of the best stagings of Molière in this century. More significantly, perhaps, they represent key moments in the history of French theater: each of these productions marks an important development in the ways that plays from the classical period were staged in France. Indeed, I hope to show that, taken together, these productions reveal an almost century-long exploration of the status and identity of “the classics” in twentieth-century French theater. These productions also reveal an abiding interest in exploring the ever-shifting understanding of the “Grand Siècle” as a value in modern and contemporary French culture.

This book, then, is an attempt to take up the challenge of Bray and Moore in a new way by writing about Molière's plays, not in the context of a generalized notion of the theater but, rather, in the context of specific moments of theatrical production. The following chapters offer a synthesis of theater history and dramatic criticism. They attempt a necessarily partial reconstruction of certain productions as a way of examining how Molière has been “read” in the French theater during this century.

The mises en scène that are the focus of this book are the products of a response both to the individual plays in question and to the extraordinarily complex cultural identity of Molière himself. In a sense these directors respond as much to what Molière represents as to the scripts he wrote. Their individual responses are themselves products of the forces of French culture (forces that collide with one another as often as they coalesce) operating within the theatrical and other artistic spheres at a given moment; the same mise en scène may, accordingly, appear conservative from one perspective and revolutionary from another. I have not attempted to map out all of the forces that may have operated on any one of the productions I shall be discussing but have, instead, chosen to concentrate on a nexus of issues: the relationship between director and playwright as manifested in directors' attitudes to the classic text; developments in directors' strategies for adapting the dramaturgy and scenography of the 1660s to the aesthetics of the twentieth century; and developments in directors' responses to the ideologies of “fidelity” and “realism.”

MOLIèRE, CLASSICAL AUTHOR

The director's goal is the creation of a mise en scène that his or her contemporaries will find theatrically compelling. In order to create a theatrically compelling mise en scène of a play by Molière, the director must first address two related problems: he or she must find a means of reconciling Molière's seventeenth-century dramaturgy with the poetics of contemporary mise en scène; he or she must also find a satisfactory way of addressing the cultural status of Molière's play as a classic, for the play is being revived in the modern theater precisely because it is a classic. In short, a compelling mise en scène of a classic text must contain both a theatrically exciting performance of the drama in question and a persuasive treatment of the play's identity as a classic.

Since Molière's text exists as a material product of a certain place and time (Paris in the 1660s), the director must choose how to explore the relationships between the text and the society in which it was created, a relationship that is complicated by the double identity of the play as both a script and a recognized literary classic. Whereas the script is but one element, however important, of the technology of the theater, the mere fact of the play's publication as a book by an important author immediately “elevates” the play to what literary scholars have regarded as the higher cultural status of Literature.⁹ (It is useful to remember that theater scripts need not take the form of a book. Molière's actors never read the complete text; instead, each actor was given a “side” or copy of his or her own part only, a practice that continued into the present century.) Molière's scripts are products of seventeenth-century French theater; Molière's “classic plays,” on the other hand, are as much, if not more so, products of more recent periods of French and other cultures.¹⁰ As classics of French culture, they have been identified as containing timeless truths about the human condition, truths that are fixed for the reader and the spectator in perfect models of dramatic form. But this notion of the classic is not a seventeenth-century one. For Molière's contemporaries, the “classics” were Greek and Roman. Although Molière and other artists of his day were consciously attempting to create their own art based on Greek and Roman models, they did not label themselves Neoclassicists. That labeling occurred much later.

Molière's status as a classic author has significantly influenced the direction of both Molière studies and productions of his plays. This influence is perhaps best seen in the tendency to treat Molière's comedies as serious dramas and to pay a great deal less attention to his farces and comédies-ballets. Since tragedy as a genre has traditionally been seen as representing a higher level of aesthetic and indeed moral achievement, scholars have tended to privilege the more serious, darker aspects of Molière's drama. Similarly, generations of directors have shown a marked preference for a “tragic” Molière.¹¹

Theater is an ephemeral art and, as such, is notoriously difficult to describe and evaluate. Productions not only eventually end their runs and literally disappear forever, but as every theater artist acknowledges, no two performances are ever alike. The published text, however, remains as a permanent trace of the original production and becomes available to each successive generation of readers and potential directors. In a culture that prizes the “timelessness” of the work of art, it is not surprising that the book of the play has superseded the performance of the play as the privileged mode of being for the dramatic work of art. Indeed, until the advent of the theatrical avant-garde at the end of the last century, the relationship between dramatic literature and its performance onstage was relatively unproblematic. With the rise to prominence of the stage director, however, the staging of the production, which I shall be referring to from a semiotic perspective as the scenic text, eventually came to rival the playwright's text as a focus of interest.

For the scholar of drama, the written text understandably remains the primary source of interest, and he or she usually tends to consider both performance and scholarship as sharing a common goal—producing the most convincing, “faithful,” or otherwise satisfactory interpretation of the text. Theater artists and spectators, however, are not primarily interested in the written text. As a playwright, actor, and director, Molière wrote his texts with the knowledge that they were to be used as only one element among many that would go into the preparation of a performance.¹² The institution of dramatic literature notwithstanding, theater scripts are not written to be read outside the theater: the potential for performance dictates the content of every line, the shape of every scene, and the identity of every character.¹³ Even the plays of Jean Racine, which are generally acknowledged as the greatest literary achievements of seventeenth-century France, were written to take advantage of the possibilities offered by a specific kind of theatrical performance.¹⁴ Arguing for the primacy of performance over text even in the case of an apparently literary theater such as Racine's, Bernard Dort writes:

On the surface, it seems to be a theater that is exclusively a theater of text. Few, if any, stage directions. Racinian tragedy seems never to have had any existence other than literary. But that is obviously not correct. In fact, the exact opposite was true. The text existed only to fulfill the requirements of an already existing form: the form of tragic performance. And the palais à volonté of the Hôtel de Bourgogne was more than a mere décor; it was, properly speaking, a symbolic location, the very image of how a certain society saw itself. The text did nothing more than furnish the ingredients for a ritual that these individuals produced for their own pleasure.

(“Les Classiques” 158)

Dort's semiotic analysis of the theatrical event is usefully comprehensive in that it avoids restricting “theatrical performance” to the narrow sense of what transpires on the stage. Instead, he proposes that we examine plays and their performances not only as purely aesthetic events abstracted from the influences of the cultural and political environment but also as responses to an identified, socially circumscribed desire. In the case of Racine, Dort suggests, the playwright was responding to the desire of a certain segment of the aristocracy to see its own experiences figured on a tragic scale.

Like Dort, theater semioticians see all scripts as, in part, responses to the signifying potential present in theatrical performance during a given period.¹⁵ In The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, for instance, Keir Elam writes:

Since, chronologically, the writing of the play precedes any given performance, it might appear quite legitimate to suppose the simple priority of one over the other. But it is equally legitimate to claim that it is the performance, or at least a possible or “model” performance, that constrains the dramatic text in its very articulation.

(208-9)

The script, then, need not be seen as a writing that exists before the performance but, instead, as a writing that is completed in performance. In a 1985 article, “Theatrical Performance,” Marving Carlson has suggested that we should see the relationship between script and performance not in terms of an adaptation, a translation, or a realization but, rather, in terms of a Derridean complementarity.

Surprisingly enough, semioticians often neglect to consider what actually happens to the script in the theatrical production process: the script (especially an unproduced script) that remains unchanged by the rehearsal process is the exception, not the rule—the dialogue the actors read at the first rehearsal is rarely the dialogue heard by spectators at the first performance.¹⁶ The script, then, represents a certain provisional conception of the dramatic potential of the stage itself, for the playwright begins work with an acquired store of theatrical experience and an acquired knowledge of the conventions of the contemporary theater; the script comes into being in the context of that knowledge.

Although Roland Barthes did not explicitly consider the question of the theater script, his celebrated distinction between work and text provides a valuable perspective on the question. Indeed, Barthes's notion of the text as intertext, as a fabric “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages … antecedent or contemporary, which cut across and through it in a vast stereophony,” applies equally well to both the script and the mise en scène that eventually subsumes it (Image-Music-Text 160). It is Barthes's intertextual view of both the script and its mise en scène that informs the following chapters.

In the theater, the author's intention is that the script be used to create something else (given a choice, most living playwrights will choose to be performed rather than understood). Certainly, one can legitimately question the effectiveness of the ways in which the script has been used, just as one can express reservations about the ways in which a certain actor or a certain kind of lighting instrument has been used. The semiotic view of the creative process in the theater should, therefore, not be understood as a means of devaluing the contribution of the playwright; rather, it should be seen as a recognition of the many different sources of creativity that combine to make an effective piece of theater.

This view of the relationship between script and mise en scène has important consequences for the study of what Jonathan Miller calls the “subsequent performances” of plays by Molière or any classic dramatist. If the script comes into being as a kind of proposal for the way the “cybernetic machine that is the theatre,” to borrow Barthes's image, can be made to function at a given moment in time, it makes no sense to ask whether or not the mise en scène has been faithful to the intentions of the author (Critical Essays 261). More productive questions will address the mise en scène, the play-in-performance, as a complex montage of different signifying systems. Furthermore, this understanding of the nature of the script reminds us that the physical realities of the theater, the personalities and skills of the performing and scenic artists, the economic health of the various theatrical and cultural institutions, as well as the tastes and opinions (aesthetic, moral, or political) of the spectators and critics provide more than a mere abstract context for the creation of the play. In fact, the play emerges from a dialectical interplay between the playwright and each of these environments. In the case of the classic playscript, these environments are precisely what have been stripped away by the passage of time, leaving behind only the “book.” As Bernard Dort reminds us, once the passage of time has separated the printed text from the cultural and theatrical conditions from which it initially emerged, insisting on fidelity to the text becomes unproductive:

One can never, dramaturgically, get away from performance. Cut off from its environment and extracted from the theatrical form in which it was to be realized, a classical text can come to life again only in another form. Let us not speak any more of being faithful to the classics or of betraying them; let us speak about the uses we make of them, uses that will never be truly productive unless they acknowledge their necessary infidelity.

(“Les Classiques” 159)

Instead of pursuing a fidelity to “the classic,” which amounts to privileging the book, Dort directs our attention to the demands of performance, reminding us of its inevitably contingent nature. Performance occurs only at specific moments and in specific locations, and because it depends on its immediate context for its significance as a cultural event, that immediate context often assumes priority over the classic text, notwithstanding the all too familiar and almost inevitable rhetorical gestures on the part of directors who suggest the contrary. Directors typically speak about their work in one or more of the following ways: as attempts to locate hitherto unsuspected meanings in the text; as attempts to present the author's thinking on issues that, in the director's estimation, are of compelling relevance in today's world; as attempts to realize the author's dramatic and theatrical ideas as fully as possible. Each of these positions appears to subject the director and his associates to communicating an already existing set of meanings. Indeed, with few exceptions directors present themselves as being faithful, first and foremost, to the author's “vision.” Such rhetoric, as Dort reminds us, has served to obfuscate the actual practice of directors in the theater. In the course of the following chapters, I shall be considering the ways in which each director articulates a personal understanding of “fidelity” to Molière as well as looking at the notions of “Molière” to which he will attempt to be faithful.

Even though he wrote plays for himself and other members of his company to act, Molière, like other playwrights of the period, prepared his scripts for publication, recognizing that his work would be read and enjoyed as dramatic literature by his contemporaries. When he prepared scripts for publication during his own lifetime, Molière assumed, as a result of his readers' familiarity with his mises en scène and conventions of the theater of the time, that his readers would be capable of mentally theatricalizing his printed words. Three centuries later, however, Molière's readers are no longer aware of the conventions of seventeenth-century theater that provided a frame of reference for Molière's printed text. The linguistic, social, and theatrical conventions adopted (or undermined) by Molière are no longer familiar to us; indeed, Molière may have consciously exploited conventions of which we remain ignorant. Instead, we read his plays in the context of our own experience of twentieth-century theater and in the context of what we imagine theatrical performance in the seventeenth century to have been like.

Each of the productions discussed in the following chapters forges a kind of aesthetic compromise between a three-hundred-year-old play and a specifically contemporary theatrical practice. These accommodations between the classic and the contemporary result in the creation, by the director, of a new text, a mise en scène that merges the dialogue of the classic script and a contemporary scenography in the moment of performance. Enveloped in the new mise en scène, the familiar script takes on a new array of possible meanings, meanings that are directly generated by the juxtaposition of the familiar script and its traditional interpretations with a new scenography. The new mise en scène alters the contours of what we imagine we know by creating a fresh set of scenic images that recontextualizes the well-known characters and dramatic events of the classic play. In addition, the new staging often fashions radically different identities for these familiar characters. (Roger Planchon's suggestion, for example, that there exists a homosexual attraction between Orgon and Tartuffe represented a somewhat startling departure from the accepted stage tradition.) The contemporary mise en scène of a classic play may, therefore, be seen as an event in which the past is confronted by the present, the already known becomes the unknown, established interpretations are overturned, and familiar cultural and moral values are contested.

The mise en scène of a Molière play can be seen as a reflection of the individual director's theoretical understanding of the nature of the neoclassical text and of its relationship to the director's culture, of which the critical, scholarly, and performance traditions constitute important parts. Planchon's production of Tartuffe, for instance, offers a detailed scenographic evocation of the political and cultural turbulence of Louis XIV's reign that frames the action of the play in an unprecedented way. Planchon's new setting represents a significant departure from the conventionally calm, balanced, and rational neoclassical aesthetic that informs conservative mises en scène of this play. He thus uses his production of Tartuffe to offer a revisionist, critical view of the Grand Siècle itself.

Antoine Vitez responds differently to the Grand Siècle and uses his mises en scène of seventeenth-century dramatic texts, both comic and tragic, to explore the extent to which these monuments of French culture, texts that are taught every year in both primary and secondary French schools, are essentially foreign, even indecipherable in terms of their aesthetic form and content to French men and women of the late twentieth century. Vitez thus takes a position completely opposed to that of Antoine's collaborator, Jacques Arnavon, who argues that Molière's thought remains unambiguously present to the reader in his scripts, even for twentieth-century directors or readers. Whereas Arnavon believes that Molière's work communicates to people of every period and is therefore a classic by virtue of its readability (lisibilité, in Barthes's sense), Vitez believes that the play's classic status is precisely what blinds us to its real nature as a text that is no longer (re)readable but only (re)writable (what Barthes calls scriptible).

The following chapters investigate the attitudes of a number of French directors to Molière's classic texts while considering those attitudes in the context of their responses to the theatrical culture of their various periods (ranging from 1907 to 1978) as well as their individual senses of the general purpose of the theater institution itself. Each of these directors is distinguished not only by the extent of his influence on subsequent generations of directors in France but also by the degree to which his work on Molière is carried out in a self-conscious manner. Each sees his work as both creative and critical: creative in the sense that he is involved in the making of new productions; critical in the sense that his new production articulates a response both to Molière's script and to the received traditions of interpretation as manifested onstage and in the writings of theater critics and scholars. Indeed, each in turn comments, in his mise en scène, on the work of his predecessor. Planchon's productions of Tartuffe, for instance, constitute a particularly trenchant critique of the interpretations of both Antoine and Jouvet while, at the same time, showing how much he has learned from these two directors. In a similar vein, Vitez explicitly identifies his tetralogy of Molière plays as a critical response to the kind of “socializing mise en scène best represented by Planchon” (Vitez, Lassalle, and Maréchal 22).

STAGING THE CLASSIC TEXT: EVOLUTIONS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

The study of the mise en scène of Molière's plays in the present century must inevitably involve some study of the career of the stage director during the same period. It is a commonplace of theater history that the last hundred years or so have been the era of the director. Edward Braun, for instance, begins his account of the history of the stage director with Saxe-Meiningen and Antoine, although he acknowledges that these two men borrowed extensively from the staging innovations of the Romantic and Realist theater (7). André Antoine, acknowledged by many as the very first modern stage director, shares Braun's sense of the director as a creature of the modern theater. In 1903 he wrote: “Mise en scène is a newborn art, and nothing, absolutely nothing before the last century, before the theater of intrigue and situation, determined its coming into being” (qtd. in Dort, “Antoine le patron” 277).

Most theater historians offer accounts strikingly similar to Braun's: without exception, they assume that the rise to power of the director during the last hundred years or so is tied to the theater's increasingly sophisticated attempts to recreate offstage reality onstage. Such histories invariably see the director as the figure of authority who emerged to impose order on the chaos of proliferating innovations in both scenography and dramaturgy, a kind of super-régisseur. The director's rise to power, however, can also be related to the director's emergence as an auteur figure of comparable stature to the playwright. From yet another perspective, the history of this same emergence could be related to the rise of the scenographer, or the visual poet of the stage, to a stature equivalent to that enjoyed by the dramatist and the actor in earlier periods.

I use the term scenographer here (rather than stage or scenic designer) to draw attention to the graphic, textual nature of the design elements of theatrical performance as well as to call attention to the primacy of the visual text in modern performances of plays from the classic repertoire. It goes without saying that no mise en scène of a classic text in this century has achieved distinction in the absence of a compelling and often innovative scenography. Certainly, the illusionist scenography of the Baroque theater attracted crowds of admiring spectators to the theater, but nobody has suggested that such visual entertainments ever achieved the cultural status accorded to the leading actors and writers of that period. In the last hundred years, however, mise en scène has become as valued a cultural product as the play itself. In the case of classic plays, the director's staging of the play has increasingly attracted the spectator's and critic's focus away from the playwright and the actor, the traditional centers of attention in the theater. Indeed, Planchon has suggested that the prominence of the twentieth-century director is a result of the emergence of a certain notion of the classic and, paradoxically, that our ideas about the classics have in turn been greatly affected by the interventions of the director:

The emergence of the classic brings with it the birth of a dubious character. He presents himself as a museum curator; leaning on Molière and Shakespeare, he levers himself into a position where he is running the whole show. We may lament the fact, but the two things are linked: the birth of the classic gives power to the theatre director. In his hands the great theatres of the world become museums and justify their existence by producing Oedipus, Hamlet, or The Miser. A museum curator “restores” works and puts them on show. And this is where the ambiguities begin.

(Qtd. in Bradby and Williams 6)

This brief excerpt from Planchon's preface to the 1986 Livre de Poche edition of L'Avare (The Miser) echoes many of the concerns of the present study.

In the eyes of Bernard Dort, founding editor of France's two most important postwar theater periodicals, Théâtre Populaire and Travail Théâtral: “The history of theatrical practice in France, at least during the period that concerns us [1945-60], could well be written in terms of a number of major productions of classic texts rather than in terms of the first productions of new plays” (“Un Age d'or” 1003-4). Although Dort's focus is the fifteen-year period immediately following World War II, his comment might equally well be applied to the entire postwar period for two reasons. First, the most prominent French directors have devoted a substantial portion of their energies to the staging of classic texts. Second, and perhaps more significantly, these directors have also achieved considerably more recognition for their work on classic texts than for their work on the first productions of new contemporary plays. Although Vilar, Planchon, and Vitez, for example, all directed the first productions (and acclaimed revivals) of plays by respected contemporary playwrights, their reputations as stage directors (rather than as artistic directors of their respective theaters) rests on their work with plays from the classic repertoire.¹⁷ In the period prior to World War II, however, directors' reputations rested equally on their work with new and classic texts. Both Antoine and Jouvet, for example, established their reputations with productions of new plays and did extensive work with classic plays only in the latter part of their careers.

Before directors as we know them today first appeared on the scene of theater history, their predecessors in the early nineteenth century began to rethink the ways in which they set about the staging of classic texts. The impulse to reconsider the established practice of the preceding two centuries finds its origins in the death of the ancien régime following the French Revolution and in the new aesthetic of Romanticism that ushered in the nineteenth century. In “Les Classiques au théâtre ou la métamorphose sans fin,” Dort describes three different notions of the classic, each of which corresponds (although not rigorously) to a period in history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dort writes, the classic was seen as an “old” play that had, by virtue of its continued popularity, remained in the repertory. Such plays were performed as if they were no different from the “new” plays of the day. Theater artists felt no need to differentiate between the old and new, Dort suggests, because classics were by definition timeless and could therefore be treated as if they had just been written.

One factor that made the play's age relatively unimportant for eighteenth-century theater artists was that eighteenth-century dramaturgy was not greatly different from that of the previous century. Similarly, eighteenth-century mise en scène differed very little from seventeenth-century mise en scène. For all intents and purposes, then, seventeenth-century plays presented few problems of technique or comprehension to the eighteenth-century theater artists who performed them or to the eighteenth-century spectators who attended those performances. (A similar situation obtains in our own period, when the naturalist/realist dramaturgy and scenography of the late nineteenth century differ so little from their counterparts of today.)

Dort suggests that with the beginnings of modern mise en scène in the nineteenth century, the classic came to be seen as a cultural product of a different place and time. As a result, artists staging old plays no longer felt able to treat the classics as if they were essentially no different from the plays of their own time. Now that the classics were identified with the past (“the past” emerged in this period as a theme in its own right), directors and designers became obsessed with researching and representing their historical context onstage. Dort cites the familiar examples of directors such as von Meiningen, Antoine, and Stanislavski sending researchers to Rome to learn about the Forum and other Roman locations for productions of Julius Caesar (“Les Classiques” 155). Like their Romantic predecessors earlier in the century, such directors assumed that the classic play's sociocultural context was that of the time and place in which the dramatic action was nominally located, not that of the culture that produced the play itself. They felt that because the action of Julius Caesar, for instance, was set in Rome, Julius Caesar was a play “about Rome.” That Julius Caesar is more a play about Elizabethan England than imperial Rome is a relatively recent perception that owes a great deal to the ongoing critique of realist representation that has played such a large role in the artistic and intellectual life of this century.

Although late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century theater artists were aware of the many technical ways in which texts from the classic period were unlike those produced by their own contemporaries, they nevertheless seem to have sensed no radical cultural otherness in those classic texts. Certainly, for all their awareness of the difficulties of staging Molière's three-hundred-year-old plays, Antoine and Jouvet both felt that they shared with Molière in a common culture. Dort suggests, however, that shortly after World War II the theater's relationship to the classic entered a third phase, as theater artists began to recognize the extent to which those classical texts were products of a theater and a culture quite different and far removed from their own. From this estranged perspective on the classic text, directors began to develop new interpretive strategies that have a great deal in common with the strategies of philosophers and literary theorists engaged in modernist and postmodernist critiques of representation.

In “Le Jeu des classiques: réécriture ou musée?” Anne Ubersfeld focuses on this third phase of the theater's response to the question of staging the classic text. For the purposes of her essay, she defines a classic as a text that was “not written for us” and needs to be “adapted for our ears” (181).¹⁸ Ubersfeld investigates the choice of interpretive strategies available to contemporary directors living in this third phase. She distinguishes two different ways of reading and interpreting the classic text: the director (and the scholar too) can either read the text in the conventional manner (lire) or disturb those conventions (délire) (182). (Ubersfeld's distinction between lire and délire recalls Barthes's distinction between work and text: we read a work [lire] whereas we “play” with a text [délire].) Reading in the traditional manner (lire), according to Ubersfeld, implies a reliance on a set of ideologically determined assumptions rooted in a bourgeois appropriation of the cultural production of the Grand Siècle, an appropriation, she points out, that was initiated by Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV. Ubersfeld enumerates these assumptions:

1) The classics are eternal because they speak to us about the unchanging nature of human passions and human character; 2) their truth is of a psychological nature, a psychology that is concerned with individuals, or more exactly, autonomous subjects; 3) their beauty stems from their formal perfection, [making them] absolute models, a universal system of reference.

(181)

The productions discussed in subsequent chapters offer particularly fruitful examples of directors wrestling with these assumptions.

Reading in the traditional manner inevitably raises what Dort calls the question of the “impossible fidelity” of the mise en scène, as such a reading assumes that there is indeed something to which the mise en scène must be faithful. Each of the directors whose work is discussed in the following chapters believed that he was being faithful to Molière. As we shall see, however, both “fidelity” and “Molière” mean something quite different in each case. Though each director claimed a certain degree of authenticity in his interpretation, he in fact staged his own ideas about the text and its sociohistorical or cultural context. Indeed, following Dort and Ubersfeld, I shall be arguing that the director can only stage ideas about the classic text. Rather than investigate how closely individual directors hew to Molière's intentions, I shall be looking at how the directors have adapted Molière's classic text to their own needs as twentieth-century theater artists.

NEW SCENOGRAPHIES FOR OLD: RECODING MOLIèRE

In their discussions of the various strategies directors have employed for dealing with the “otherness” of the classic text, Dort and Ubersfeld display a clear preference for what they call “historicization” (a concept borrowed from Brecht). For Dort, the key element of a historicization consists in making the classic text's historically determined difference the “center of gravity” of the contemporary mise en scène:

While respecting the letter of the work, it is a matter of reinserting it in its historical and social context, and of restoring, to the stage and for today's audience, that unity created by the staging. It is not a matter of attempting, as Antoine did a little naïvely, to reconstitute “the performance of the Cid in 1637” on the stage of the Odéon, but of performing both the play and the distance that separates us from it and from the society from which it emerged and which it reflects in its own manner—indeed, to make of that distance the center of gravity of the performance.

(“Un Age d'or” 1012)

Each of the mises en scène discussed in the following chapters reveals just such a self-conscious attempt at a reconstitution that reflects the director's own vision of Molière's period and/or the status of the Grand Siècle in twentieth-century French culture.

Ubersfeld, for her part, discusses historicization in a more explicitly semiotic manner. She suggests that the director's primary responsibility in staging a play that “was not written for us” is to translate what she calls the “scripted unspoken” (non-dit textuel) of the earlier period into its contemporary equivalent. The director is thus faced with a semiotic problem of considerable magnitude. But the problem is even more complicated, for, as Ubersfeld points out, the classic text has itself acquired with the passage of time a range of connotations that have to do with its status as a cultural object:

The director's task is to find an equivalent for connotations that have become evanescent. … The twentieth-century spectator imposes on the text connotations that are those of his own personal culture—not to mention connotations that originate from his cultural relationship with the object itself. The classic [text], read “in class,” imposes connotations of its “imaginary” monumentality.

(“Le Jeu des classiques” 183)

Ubersfeld is not, however, as her examples will clarify, proposing that we see the director as a kind of supertranslator who can master the cultural and theatrical codes of two distinct historical periods and, through the medium of mise en scène, convey a cultural “message” of some complexity across history. Like Dort, she believes that directors can best deal with the “scripted unspoken” by introducing what she calls “a mimetic frame” into the mise en scène.

As examples of what she considers mimetic frames that effectively historicized some of Molière's classic texts, she cites Planchon's representations of Orgon's house and George Dandin's farm. In his celebrated 1960s production of George Dandin, Planchon showed the farm workers toiling in Dandin's farmyard during the action of the play. He thus juxtaposed the behavior of the Dandins and their in-laws with the spectacle of their workers sweating at their labor. Although Planchon's scenography provides a historically accurate rendering of life in a seventeenth-century farmyard, Molière's text makes no reference to Dandin's employees working in the farmyard, nor did Molière's own mise en scène attempt to recreate Dandin's “real-life” environment onstage. But Planchon did not feel obliged to restrict himself to representing only what was explicitly mentioned in Molière's text. In fact, he chose to stage what Molière's text remained completely silent about, to frame Molière's text in a way that would have been quite literally unimaginable in Molière's theater. Planchon elected to juxtapose a theatrical fable with a scenographic evocation of a historical reality; he elected to historicize. In doing so, Planchon made Molière's text signify in a new way. By framing Molière's comic action with images of backbreaking physical labor, Planchon used Molière's play to draw our attention to aspects of life in the Grand Siècle that Molière's classic text never addressed.

Historicization is a means of encouraging the spectator to focus on the way in which the action is framed scenographically as much as on the action itself. It is achieved by creating scenic images that the spectator will recognize as representing something other than the location of the events of the play in the conventional realist manner. In other words, the spectator is encouraged to recognize that the scenography presents a narrative of its own. Planchon calls this scenographic narrative an écriture scénique (literally, “scenic writing”). The scenic writing, in Planchon's conception, is a narrative that does not illustrate or realize the play as those processes have traditionally been understood. Planchon developed his concept of écriture scénique in response to the experience of seeing Brecht's work with the Berliner Ensemble on their second visit to Paris in the 1950s.¹⁹ Planchon writes:

The lesson of Brecht is to have declared that a performance combines both dramatic writing and scenic writing; but the scenic writing—he was the first to say this and it seems to me to be very important—has an equal responsibility with the dramatic writing. In fact any movement on the stage, the choice of a color, a set, a costume, etc., involves a total responsibility. The scenic writing has a total responsibility in the same way as writing taken on its own: I mean the writing of a novel or a play.

(Qtd. in Bradby and Williams 55)

Thus, in a historicized mise en scène, the spectator is not encouraged to locate the meaning of the play solely in the interactions of the playwright's characters or in the realism-based interactions of character and milieu; instead, the spectator is encouraged to investigate the possible significances of apparent discontinuities between the mise en scène and the classic text.

Notes

1. See also the Bray and Scherer edition of Molière's complete works, which contains discussions of significant performances of individual plays. Bray's other major contribution to our understanding of seventeenth-century French dramaturgy is La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (1927).

2. Moore's title clearly associates his project with that of the New Criticism, which at the time was positioned in the avant-garde of literary studies. Such an overt commitment to a mode of analysis so inextricably bound up with a certain notion of literature, of textuality, and of authorship probably made any engagement with the theater as an artistic practice and as a cultural institution almost impossible.

3. Among the most productive linkings of the “aesthetic” and the “ethical” in recent Molière criticism are Judd Hubert's Molière and the Comedy of Intellect; Ralph Albanese, Jr.'s Le Dynamisme de la peur chez Molière; and Jules Brody's two articles, “Esthétique et société chez Molière” and “Dom Juan and Le Misanthrope, or the Esthetics of Individualism in Molière.”

4. Noteworthy exceptions to this trend include Jacques Scherer's Structures de Tartuffe (1974) and, more recently, Albert Bermel's Molière's Theatrical Bounty (1990). Both of these books are altogether exceptional in their sensitivity to the material problems of performance.

5. Curiously enough, the critical obsession with the raisonneur may be a response to the pervasive use of just such a moralizing character by the nineteenth-century members of the école de bon sens and authors of the mélodrame and the pièce bien faite. For an excellent history of nineteenth-century French theater, see Marvin Carlson's The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (1972).

6. I have found the second edition of T. E. Lawrenson's The French Stage and Playhouse in the XVIIth Century (1986) especially useful.

7. Very few descriptions exist of those mises en scène, and those that are available are extremely problematic. Herzel's discussion of Molière's “natural” acting style, for instance, is considerably hampered by the absence of a reliable frame of reference. In addition, Herzel is constrained to rely on discussions of Molière's acting by various individuals, many of whom were not theater people. Herzel encounters a similar problem when he discusses the illustrations of several Molière productions by Brissart and Chauveau—he is forced to guess at the extent to which their representations can be relied on. The fact that Brissart and Chauveau do not show spectators on stage (something we know to have been the case) severely damages their credibility as visual witnesses.

8. For a detailed discussion of Molière's natural acting, see Herzel's “Le Jeu ‘naturel’ de Molière et de sa troupe.”

9. For a particularly trenchant discussion of the institution of Literature, see the first chapter of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory. What Eagleton has to say about “English Literature” can readily be applied to “French Literature,” a subject that first emerged, interestingly enough, in English universities.

10. Even in the seventeenth century Molière dramaturgy exercised a significant influence on English Restoration playwriting. Since the time of the Restoration translations of Molière's plays have been a staple of the English-language theater. As far as literary studies are concerned, scholars both in France and elsewhere have demonstrated an unflagging interest in his writings dating from the inception of the discipline of French Studies.

11. See Robert Nelson's “Classicism” for an excellent discussion of the ways in which Molière's plays have been read through Racine's. Nelson identifies what he calls a “classico-Racinian teleology” in Molière studies that stems from the tradition of seeing The Misanthrope, the most regularly neoclassical of the plays, as Molière's “best” play.

12. Nothing suggests that Molière ever gave any thought to the possibility that another director would want to stage his plays after his lifetime. Like every playwright of the period, he was concerned with guarding against pirated versions of his scripts being published, but there was no reason for him to have feared another company staging one of his plays in competition with one of his own productions.

13. There are, of course, well-known exceptions to this general rule. Even in Molière's time, authors who achieved no success in the theater often sought publication as a way of vindicating the quality of their work. As often as not, however, the academic correctness of such plays made up for what they lacked in theatrical inventiveness and stageworthiness.

14. David Maskell's recent Racine: A Theatrical Reading (1991) is the first English-language book-length analysis of Racine's tragedies grounded in the performance possibilities of the seventeenth-century tragic stage.

15. Bernard Dort is more often seen as France's foremost Brecht scholar than as a semiotician. He has, however, been in close contact with France's leading theater semioticians for most of his postwar career. Anne Ubersfeld and Patrice Pavis, for example, have been his colleagues in the Theatre Department at the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) for many years. In any case, it would be difficult to overestimate Brecht's influence on the development of French theater semiotics.

16. No rehearsal drafts from the French classical period survive.

17. Perhaps one of the more obvious explanations for this phenomenon is the correct one: the director's contribution to the mise en scène of a classic text, particularly a well-known one, is not obscured by the presence of a living author and a contemporary dramaturgy. Indeed, in their 1988 book, Directors' Theatre, Bradby and Williams propose the director's assumption of the author function as a defining characteristic of “directors' theatre” (1).

18. Based on this definition of the classic which, she admits, privileges the French classical period from Corneille to Beaumarchais, Ubersfeld declines to acknowledge the plays of Musset, Lenz, or Büchner as classics on the grounds that their problematics are too close to those of her own period. In considering what remains and does not remain comprehensible or readable to us in the late twentieth century, Ubersfeld surprisingly elects to focus on the apparent content of the plays in question rather than on issues of form. Thus, we can understand Lorenzaccio, she argues, because the “social mechanism” that drives the plot is still transparent to us more than a century later. But other aspects of Musset's dramaturgy are equally relevant to this discussion. And surely the “social mechanisms” represented in the plays of Lenz and Büchner are not the only factors that account for the commonly asserted “modernity” of these authors. Despite these ambiguities of definition, however, her notion of the classic as having been written for others remains exceptionally productive.

19. For an excellent discussion of Brecht's use of scenic writing, see John Rouse's article, “Brecht and the Art of Scenic Writing.”

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