[In the following essay, Peacock discusses the issues surrounding the translation of Molière's plays, focusing on three types of translators: conservationists, modernists, and postmodernists.]

If we are not careful, Molière could become one of the obstacles to a united Europe. How can you trade freely, let alone merge with a nation whose best comedy does not travel?¹

This ironic taunt by John Peter in 1987, which could so easily have been taken for a backbench salvo in the Maastricht debate in 1993, gives expression to the disquiet, shared by numerous actors, directors, and especially theatre box-office managers, at the lack of performable translations of Molière in English. The dramatic ineffectiveness, not to mention unspeakability, of certain versions, has given a misleading impression of the great comic dramatist, even to the point of causing The Daily Telegraph's drama critic, Charles Spencer—paradoxically—to suspect ‘that there was nothing wrong with Molière that a sense of humour wouldn't have put right […]’.² One of the problems is the discrepancy between page and stage: many translations are aimed at publication rather than at performance. The result is that they are often confined to library bookshelves and dusted down by those engaged in academic study and not by theatre practitioners. As John Fowles has indicated, Molière has been consigned to a theatrical limbo in Britain, to the status of a study dramatist: ‘on the whole we don't know what to do with him so we leave him alone’.³ Molière himself, in his much-cited prefatory advice in L'Amour médecin, limited readership to those willing to exercise their theatrical imagination:

et je ne conseille de lire celle-ci qu'aux personnes qui ont des yeux pour découvrir dans la lecture tout le jeu du théâtre.

A translator's unawareness of the practicalities of the theatre may be illustrated from the embarrassment inflicted on an actor by Henri Van Laun, whose recently republished translation of Le Misanthrope⁴ assigns to the plain speaking Alceste a line whose pedantry gives another dimension to Molière's humour:

… your ebullitions of tenderness know no bounds. Zounds!

Another problem is the low status accorded to the art of translating. Promotion Boards and Research Assessment Panels seem to pay scant attention to translations, whatever their intrinsic merits. Theatre managers tend to be equally dismissive in awarding minimal royalties (one translator recently received 3٪ of royalties, with the author receiving 10٪).

This paper, then, will explore theatrically successful solutions to the problem of translating Molière for the English stage. The ‘translators’ have been placed into three categories: conservationists, modernisers and post-modernisers. The nomenclature is used rather idiosyncratically, and has been preferred to the more conventional critical suffixes (conservatives, modernists and post-modernists), which tend, these days, to lead to confusion, and to be viewed pejoratively. By conservationists, I understand those who wish to preserve all the outward features of the seventeenth-century structure, albeit in a renewed form; by modernisers, those who have upgraded certain aspects for the modern age; by post-modernisers, those who have knocked down and rebuilt the main structure but have used some of the original materials. The boundaries between the different kinds of terminological architecture are, however, somewhat fluid.

Firstly, the conservationists, whose main emphasis is on fidelity to the original. The leading modern exponent, Richard Wilbur, produced a line-by-line translation in iambic pentameters of The Misanthrope (1955), Tartuffe (1963), The School for Wives (1971) and The Learned Ladies (1978). The only major liberties taken were in suggesting no one period and in the use of a modern idiom. Wilbur was highly critical of contemporary modernisations in which the loss of a credible social frame for him entailed a loss of meaning. He cited the example of a translation in which Alceste entered a twentieth-century American living room in hippy attire, a ten-speed bicycle under his arm, insisting ‘tell it like it is’. In Wilbur's preface to The Learned Ladies (1978), he expressed the hope that all readers would envision his translation in a ‘just historical perspective’. Wilbur's translations were praised for their elegance, wit and accuracy. The elevated tone given by the versification helped him to retain Molière's parody of tragic diction.

In America, his work was regarded as ‘the nearest thing to Molière that we have’;⁵ his Tartuffe was awarded a share of the Bollingen translation prize in 1963. In Britain, however, very quotable strictures applied by some of his first reviewers have perhaps had a dissuasive effect on directors. W. A. Darlington (The Daily Telegraph, 22 November 1967) dimissed the mode of expression as an ‘uninspired jog-trot translation’ evocative of the doggerel that used to be reeled out in Victorian pantomimes; ‘trumpery translation’ exclaimed Harold Hobson (The Sunday Times, 25 August 1974); Sean Day-Lewis (The Daily Telegraph, 28 November 1971) pleaded for ‘lines not chimes’; and Tony Harrison damned Wilbur with faint praise: ‘[His Tartuffe and Misanthrope] are hard polished closet drama’.⁶ Wilbur's rehabilitation in England has come from performances of his Misanthrope in Manchester and London in 1981, and, most recently, in the highly successful School for Wives (running at the Almeida Theatre, London, from December 1993 to January 1994), which has earned him the accolade of ‘prince among contemporary translators’.⁷

Ian Maclean's revision (in 1989) of George Gravely's Precious Provincials, Don Juan, The Reluctant Doctor, The Miser, The Would-Be-Gentleman and Scapin the Schemer, and his own version of George Dandin, have not sacrificed academic rigour to theatrical expediency. Maclean has preserved Gravely's awareness of the exigencies of the stage without falsifying the meaning of the original. Gravely's expression, which was probably somewhat archaic even at the time of composition,⁸ has been rendered into modern prose. However, Maclean emphasises the timelessness of Molière's art in retaining, albeit with a glossary for the reader, Molière's allusions to contemporary society and culture.⁹

Halfway between conservationist and moderniser, Miles Malleson was one of the first of the postwar ‘translators’ to subject Molière's texts to the theatrical emendations appropriate to the English stage. A modern languages graduate, with access to the original French versions, Malleson debunked the notion that Molière's scripts were sacred texts, to which not one jot or tittle could be added and from which nothing could be taken away. Malleson kept to a large extent the French setting and plot but adopted a modern idiom. The dramatic movement was altered by repetitions, disruption of long speeches with laconic interjections from audiences on stage (indignant fathers, so-called raisonneurs, and impetuous children). Central traits of character were sharpened to give comic emphasis. (Like Molière, Malleson, as an actor-playwright, was not unmindful of the need to create good parts for himself!) Malleson's quite free adaptations of Sganarelle (1955), L'École des femmes (1954), Tartuffe (1950), Le Misanthrope (1956), L'Avare (1948), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1951) and Le Malade imaginaire (1959), would on occasion omit minor roles (for example, the lawyer in The School for Wives, ‘Un Parent de sa Femme’ and Villebrequin in Sganarelle), or on occasion, add speeches and scenes (for example, the extra scene in The School for Wives, in which he dramatizes Horace's fall from the ladder). Malleson's Tartuffe, which takes the form of a play within a play, is an imaginative attempt to situate, in a theatrical and historical context, Molière's problematic five-act play. Malleson provides by way of preface an anachronistic reworking of scenes from L'Impromptu de Versailles, in which the King is seen interrupting a rehearsal in order to command a performance of Tartuffe. The visible presence of the Supreme Spectator throughout the latter spectacle prepares the audience for the panegyric to Louis which so many critics and directors have found embarrassing.¹⁰

Despite the modern idiom, Malleson's focus is rather traditional: his imaginaire is an entirely comic figure, misguided but not totally unlikeable. Malleson's work retained its popularity for about three decades, and even now, is a source for adaptors unfamiliar with the original French versions.

Recent modernisers have, however, been more bold. Two adaptations of L'Avare highlight the generic ambiguities which critics have discerned in Molière's text. Jeremy Sams's version, written for Stephen Pimlott's production at The National Theatre in 1991, has been described as a ‘black comedy’, or a ‘white tragedy’. In both the translation and the production, Harpagon emerges as a ‘financier for our times’, rather than as the ‘traditional pantaloon’. Sams's main innovation lies in his manipulation of registers. The ostentatiously low diction has justifiably been criticised for going beyond the verbal restraints recognised by even the most intemperate of Molière's rogues and obsessionals.¹¹ The vituperative lexis is, however, not gratuitously shocking, but is perhaps intended to intensify a linguistic contrast inherent in the original, namely between the worlds of romance and of money. The confessio amantis of both Élise and Valère, conveyed by Molière in exaggeratedly precious prose, is expressed by Sams in rhythmic verse, which at times creeps into rhyme (in Act I, scene i). Sams has further recourse to verse upon the entry of Anselme at the end of the play to denote the rise in emotional temperature. Critical opinion was extremely divided: ‘Charnel-house Molière’ cried Benedict Nightingale in The Times (11 May 1991); ‘one of the best Molière productions I have seen anywhere, ever’ was John Peter's retort in The Sunday Times (12 May 1991).

In Mike Alfreds's farcical modernisation of L'Avare (1990, for The Oxford Stage Company) the currency is updated to that of the single European Monetary System. The world of romance is conveyed by rhyming couplets. These preserve, albeit in a less subtle form, Molière's parody of the lovers' earnest protestations:

I know I must do what I'm told

Fathers know better because they're old

Ignore this scandal

Your father is the one we have to handle.

Alfreds's rendering is, as he styled it himself, ‘a beggar's burlesque’, with its origins in pantomime, or even, as one reviewer facetiously remarked, the ‘Carry On Tradition’.¹²

The most influential moderniser, however, remains Tony Harrison, whose updating of The Misanthrope (1973) to De Gaulle's Paris of 1966, encouraged a radical re-examination of the presuppositions underpinning translation of Molière. Harrison condemned the almost ‘fetishistic’ belief in the fixity of the text:

It seems to me that one could do worse than treat a translation as one does a décor or production as endlessly renewable.¹³

For Harrison, a translation is inextricably linked to a production. It is subject to endless emendations and updating, and has a limited lifespan. For The Misanthrope, Harrison's method was a collaborative one, incorporating insights from the producer John Dexter and from the principal actors; votes were taken to decide on the best readings where alternatives were given. The originality of Harrison's enterprise lay not solely in the topical transposition but also in the fusion of epigrams and colloquialisms, and in an eclectic versification:

I have made use of a couplet similar to the one I used in The Loiners, running the lines over, breaking up sentences, sometimes using the odd half-rhyme to subdue the chime, playing off the generally colloquial tone and syntax against the formal structure, letting the occasional couplet leap out as an epigram in moments of devastation or wit. My floating 's is a way of linking the couplet at the joint and speeding up the pace by making the speaker deliver it as almost one line not two […]. I have made use of the occasional Drydenian triplet, and, once in Act III, of something I call a ‘switchback’ rhyme, a device I derive from the works of George Formby […].¹⁴

Some of his inventions are rather questionable, such as turning the ‘tribunal des Maréchaux’ into a midnight meeting of the Members of the French Academy at Maxim's, presided over by André Malraux; or assigning to Éliante, whose language in Molière is replete with abstract expressions, the occasional vulgarity: ‘his monstrous mistress with enormous bubs’. However, as The Times's reviewer acknowledged (16 March 1989), Harrison's translation set an unsurpassed standard in the reworking of French classics, ‘combining the maximum idiomatic freedom with the severest metrical precision, and yielding strings of marvellous new jokes unknown to Molière but perfectly in keeping with his comedy’. But, as Harrison predicted, his work dated quickly. In the revival at the National Theatre in 1989, the play had slipped back into a ‘comic never-never land’. De Gaulle's Paris was very different from that of Mitterand, and even from that of Giscard d'Estaing.

Nevertheless, Harrison raised the status of the translator to that of co-dramatist. The new direction was followed by John Fowles, the author of The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and a former student of French literature at Oxford. His translation of Dom Juan, which, he claimed, was ‘done with the help of one of my old Oxford professors’, left an old London professor with some reservations:

I can give John Fowles a mark of only alpha-double-minus stroke beta-plus […]. There are some inadvertent mistranslations.¹⁵

Fowles's conception of the play was, however, highly innovative, as he indicated in an interview with John Higgins of The Times (6 April 1981):

… Dom Juan is […] about the use and abuse of language. I see Juan as a semiologist, a kind of early Roland Barthes.

Fowles's eponymous hero constructs and deconstructs the language of his interlocutors. His servant, Sganarelle also communicates on a higher verbal plane (for example, ‘vous ne m'en aviez rien dit’ is rendered by ‘you hadn't vouchsafed me a clarification’; ‘je vous dirai franchement’ by ‘I must tell you without circumloquacity’).

Ranjit Bolt's 1987 version of Les Femmes savantes (entitled The Sisterhood) and his Tartuffe (1991) were also written under the sign of Harrison, whose Misanthrope had been an inspiration to Bolt since he first saw it at the Old Vic at the age of 15.¹⁶ Topicality in The Sisterhood included: a discussion of deconstructionists leading to the femmes savantes's rejection of Derrida, Lacan and Foucault; their adopting a Marxist response to Trissotin's poem; Ariste's reported luncheon with Raymond Barre; Martine's confusion of decompose and deconstruct; and the upgrading of Trissotin's violet-coloured carriage (the subject of his poem) to a purple Porsche.¹⁷

Bolt's Tartuffe evokes a new swaggartly-topical soteriology. The quasi-messianic pretensions of his Tartuffe are parodied by Cléante's ironic question as he watches Tartuffe pour out a glass of wine:

Have you been sent to save us from sin?

And what was the water before I came in?

Bolt's self-conscious rhyming, however clever and witty, tends to attenuate any satiric barbs implicit in the translation. In Sir Peter Hall's production in 1991 at The Playhouse Theatre, London, the actors were encouraged to end-stop each line, thus calling attention to the unconventional juxtapositions:

I must say my [pause]

Erotic tinder isn't half so dry.

What earthly happiness is equated to [pause]

The happiness of being loved by you.

Look at him, he's totally besotted [pause]

If there's Tartuffo-mania he's got it!

As for the third group of ‘translators’, the post-modernisers have transformed, or even severed links with, their French source. Their parentage may, paradoxically, be traced to the Restoration dramatists, who, like unwanted orphans were abandoned by eighteenth-century ‘formalists’ and nineteenth-century ‘moralists’. These dramatists eschewed literal translation and adaptation. The most faithful among them tended to paraphrase Molière. The majority, however, perceived the need to transform their source to cater for the different tastes of English and French audiences. Molière's respect for the bienséances was found to be less appealing to seventeenth-century English audiences whose penchant for realism led dramatists to attenuate French stylisation and to lower the status of some of the characters.¹⁸ In their search for theatrical elements likely to appeal to their public, Restoration dramatists often had little regard for the aesthetic coherence of the plays from which they pillaged. Very few Restoration comedies could, even loosely, be termed translations of Molière.¹⁹ In fact, some compositions combined incidents from different plays.²⁰

Into the category of post-modernisers may also be placed Neil Bartlett and Jatinda Verma. In Bartlett's version of Le Misanthrope (1988), the link with the French past is cut: the setting is Célimène's ritzy pied à terre in the newly-fashionable London Docklands. The Court of Louis XIV together with its power-crazed retinue has become the world of contemporary media chic, with its obsequious fashion followers. The cast is reduced to six (most probably for practical rather than for ideological reasons, there being only six actors in the Red Shift company for whom the play was written). Bartlett's Alceste is a waspish literary critic and journalist from North of the Border who finds himself isolated amongst the media moguls and the fashionable yuppie set. The wearer o' the green is referred to as Tartan Teddie. Oronte's role is expanded to include the speeches of the marquesses.

Bartlett has retained the twelve-syllable alexandrine, which gives metrical formality to his anachronistic licence. The adaptation, commended for an epigrammatic brilliance reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, is full of media jargon. Philinte's opening line ‘Qu'est-ce donc?’ is rendered by ‘What's up doc?’; his justification of complacency, by: ‘They're part of the package, part of being a man’. Oronte's sonnet, which is read off the back of a pack of Sobranies, becomes transfixed on the London underground:

My love is like a Northern Line Station

I get stuck on it […].

The image is sustained:

Being a man what should I do

But tend upon the timetable of my desire.

Oronte's composition provokes a rare direct statement from Célimène: ‘His mind is as bland as his verse’. Alceste's language too is invaded by the vulgarity of media-speak as well as by the lexis sometimes associated with his northern temperament. The linguistic lobotomy performed on Molière's atrabilaire is perhaps best illustrated in the ‘translation’ of Alceste's mock-heroic exit:

Crippled by injustice, spat upon by shits,

I'll book a one-way ticket out of this abyss.

Trahi de toutes parts, accablés d'injustices,

Je vais sortir d'un gouffre où triomphent les vices […].

Molière's high moral discourse has to give way to the language of expediency and of commerce. This is the price for a ‘Misanthrope for our times’!

Bartlett's School for Wives (written for the Derby Playhouse in 1990) transposes the French setting to modern-day Derby. Arnolphe is a smug Tory City Councillor, who mouths Thatcherite slogans on morality while at the same time keeping in a little house a black girl from a one-parent family (Molière's Agnès). Ethical questions in Molière are thus given by Bartlett an ethnic dimension.

Ethnicity is a key issue in Jatinda Verma's recreation of Tartuffe for the National Theatre in 1990. An out-of-favour Hindu Poet, Pandit Ravi Varma, is commissioned by a bigoted Muslim leader, the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707) to provide a version of Tartuffe to mark the visit to the Indian Court of one of Molière's friends, the traveller François Bernier. Tartuffe is portrayed as a ‘faking fakir’ who flagellates himself in mock-repentance with scrunched-up dhoti, and who guzzles Indian delicacies while Organ's wife is grievously stricken with an attack of dum-dum fever.

In this play-within-a-play, the role of the translator is given self-conscious prominence. In his programme note, Jatinda Verma indicates that the translator's art entails transforming the original. In support of his argument he cites Salman Rushdie's notion of cultural identity:

… [is] not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes [seem] to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest? (The Satanic Verses)

The written text of Verma's created translator is subjected to a significant emendation. His ending leaves Orgon and his family as penniless exiles. The Moghul Emperor requires, however, a flattering postscriptum which approximates to Molière's introduction of the Exempt. The imperator ex machina closure seems gratuitous. In fact, as Jim Hiley quipped in The Listener (8 March 1990), it is ‘almost as if Salman Rushdie had renounced The Satanic Verses’. At one level, the ‘phoney aesthetic’ is politically subversive in its ironic presentation of the fundamentalist despot's censure of the poet's dénouement. At another level, Verma's invention reopens the debate over the Urtartuffe and invites fresh speculation with regard to Molière's original three-act composition in 1664.

In conclusion, let us assess briefly the significance of these adaptations for Molière studies. In the first place, the trend towards radical revisionism reflects the growing tendency in France to replace the authority of the text by that of the director. Even in recent translations in which there is a professed adherence to the text, there is a modification of setting (for example, Derek Mahon's School for Wives (1986) is set just before the July Revolution of 1830, with Arnolphe based in Avignon but aspiring to the nobility of Paris as represented by Horace and Oronte). It is not insignificant that a number of the ‘translations’ have been undertaken by theatrical directors, and for a particular company and production. Sometimes their work has been based on a translation and not on the original French version.²¹

Secondly, the mode of expression is becoming increasingly concrete and colloquial. Even John Fowles's literary rendering of Dom Juan contained ‘frank twentieth-century terms in place of seventeenth-century decorum’,²² which caused purists no little disquiet. A new low verbal threshold was set by Jeremy Sams. However, to judge from reviews, this has already been lowered by the earthy, boisterous tone of Nick Dear's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (National Theatre 1992). It will be interesting to follow the theatrical fortunes of Ian Maclean's revision of George Gravely's more high-flown translations, and of his own version of George Dandin.

Thirdly, the divorce between stage and study is perhaps not as marked as it might appear. Though these adaptations obviously cannot be recommended as parallel texts, they give theatrical expression to debates in criticism: for example, the problematic ending of Tartuffe; the comic possibilities offered by Molière's versification (a largely unexplored area in Molière studies); those seemingly embarrassing passages—for example, the first two scenes and the ending of L'Avare; Cléante's long speeches in Tartuffe; generic problems—for example, is L'Avare a comedy, a farce or a dark play, or all three things combined in a single aesthetic?

Finally, these adaptations raise fundamental questions with regard to the art of translating Molière for the English stage. Do the aesthetics of performance justify the sacrifice of accuracy? Should the preposition in the title of the translation be changed from by to after Molière? Should the authors discussed above be termed traducers or translators? Such questions cannot, however, be answered within the scope of this paper. It is sufficient to say that, however faithful the translation, if it is incapable of stimulating the theatrical imagination of director, actors and audience, it fails the litmus test of all drama. The works discussed pass the above test—sometimes with distinction. Yet, if I may have recourse to an old cliché, even some of the more traditionally orientated versions may be seen as a betrayal of the original. However, such betrayal is paradoxically a faithful one, if judged by the ‘spirit’ and not the ‘letter’ of Molière's dramaturgy. For the ‘translators’ are contributing to a revival of interest in Molière,²³ not least among a new generation of theatregoers, beyond whose philological grasp the original versions would otherwise perhaps forever lie.

Notes

1. The Sunday Times, 18 October 1987.

2. The Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1990.

3. The Times, 6 April 1981.

4. First published in 1876 (by William Paterson, Edinburgh) and revived in 1992 (by Dover Publications, New York).

5. See John Simon, ‘Translation or Adaptation’, in From Parnassus: Essays in honor of Jacques Barzun, edited by D. B. Weiner and W. R. Keylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 147-57; Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1993), pp. 43, 75-76, 121-22, 139, 180.

6. Tony Harrison, ‘Molière Nationalized’, Revue d'histoire du théâtre (1973), 169-86 (p. 169).

7. John Gross's commendation in The Sunday Telegraph (12 December 1993) is consistent with that of other reviewers: Michael Billington, The Guardian (10 December 1993): ‘Richard Wilbur's sprightly translation’; the drama critic of The Independent (15 December 1993): ‘Richard Wilbur's enjoyably inventive translation’; George Craig, TLS, 4733 (17 December 1993): ‘Richard Wilbur's translation is assured and sensitive. There are some memorable rhymes […].’

8. Maclean considers the style somewhat similar to that of Restoration dramatists. Gravely's versions of Les Précieuses ridicules, Le Médecin malgré lui and Les Fourberies de Scapin were originally undertaken in 1916; his L'Avare in 1919. Gravely revised these translations in 1945, and added in 1948 translations of Dom Juan and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (see Ian Maclean, Molière: Don Juan and Other Plays (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. xxi).

9. For example, ‘Trivelino’, ‘Aronce […] Clélie’, ‘Cirrus the Great’, ‘petit coucher’, ‘Great Comedians’, ‘Perdrigeon’, ‘Gombaud and Macée’.

10. For further discussion of Malleson's adaptations see: J. Copley, ‘On Translating Molière into English’, Durham University Journal, 52 (1959-60), 116-24; Peacock, op. cit., pp. 9-10, 23-25, 60-61, 69-73, 117-18, 159-61, 192-93, 212-13.

11. See, for example: Stephen Bamforth, ‘Reflections on the National Theatre's New Miser (9 May 1991)’, FSB, 40 (Autumn 1991), 18-20: ‘… racy to be sure, but not quite the sort of thing you expect from French classical theatre, not even Molière's’; Malcolm Bowie, ‘Greed's Epic Poet’, TLS, 4598 (17 May 1991): ‘A small blemish, perhaps, in a production where such all-in gusto often works well but Molière's writing deserves better than this’.

12. Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1990.

13. Harrison, art. cit., p. 172.

14. Harrison's introduction to The Misanthrope (London: Rex Collings, 1973), p. vi.

15. John Weightman, TLS, 4072 (17 April 1981).

16. See Robert Gore Langton's interview with Ranjit Bolt in The Times, 4 June 1990.

17. See the review in the TLS, 4420 (18 December 1987) by Maya Slater.

18. For example, in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, Molière's sophisticated coquette, Célimène, is vulgarised into the unambiguously promiscuous Olivia; l'homme aux rubans verts is transformed into a coarse, blustering sailor.

19. There are only five generally accepted translations: Sir William D'Avenant's Sganarelle in The Playhouse to be Let, John Dryden's Amphitryon, Thomas Otway's The Cheats of Scapin, Thomas Medbourne's Tartuffe or the French Puriton, and Sir John Vanbrugh's The Mistake.

20. The eclecticism of the Restoration dramatists can be seen in Edward Ravenscroft's Scaramouch, which brings together elements of Le Mariage forcé, Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, or in his Mamamouchi, which was based on Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

21. For example, Jatinda Verma openly acknowledged in his programme note that his Tartuffe was based on a translation from the French by Philippe Cherbonnier.

22. See Weightman, art. cit.

23. See, for example, the number of performances since 1989 in London, a theatrical centre previously regarded as unpropitious to productions of Molière: 1989—Le Misanthrope (Neil Bartlett, Young Vic), The Misanthrope (Tony Harrison, National); 1990—The Miser (Mike Alfreds, Young Vic), Tartuffe (Jatinda Verma, National), Tartuffe (David Bryer, Palace [Watford]); 1991—The Miser (Jeremy Sams, National), Tartuffe (Ranjit Bolt, Playhouse); 1992—Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Nick Dear, National); 1993—The School for Wives (Richard Wilbur, Almeida).