ARTicles vol. 2 i.4b: The Comedy of Tragedy

Ryan McKittrick: In rehearsals, you’ve often talked about the tragic elements in Molière’s comedies. Could you explain what you mean? Dominique Serrand: Racine and Corneille had a great influence on Molière. He actually directed and acted in some of Corneille’s plays, and the two writers watched each other very closely. I appreciate Ariane Mnouchkine’s film Molière because it shows how all Molière wanted to do in his early years was perform tragedy. He hated traditional farce. He thought it had become stale. So what he eventually did was draw from the new tragedies and from the traditions of commedia dell’arte and farce to create a whole new genre. Tartuffe, for example, is profoundly tragic. It has very funny moments, but some of the writing has absolutely no comedy in it. Since the 1970s, many directors have been looking at Molière as a very powerful voice, not just a humorous one. At the end of a Molière play you need to feel agitated. R.M.: What is tragic in The Miser? D.S.: The play seems close to the times we’re living in today – cynical and without hope. The tragedy in The Miser exists between the lines, in the silence between the characters. It’s a desperate world. The language is based on lies, because when you’re dealing with a tyrant everything has to be coded. It’s difficult to translate the play, because the language of the original text naturally seems old to us. But it’s important to distinguish the difference between what is just antiquated and what was convoluted in Molière’s own time. The characters in The Miser are often forced to think carefully about their words and disguise their thoughts; and as a result their phrases are frequently long and profoundly unnatural. There’s a distance between the characters because they don’t dare speak the truth. When they do, the language becomes very fast. The scenes between La Flèche and Harpagon, for example, are quick and direct, but every time La Flèche needs to lie, he has a long sentence. R.M.: The Miser is much darker than many of Molière’s early plays. What inspired the change of tone in his playwriting? D.S.: When Molière wrote The Miser, both Tartuffe and Dom Juan had been censored. This obviously had a severe impact on his company’s financial and spiritual life. Molière was bitter when he wrote The Miser, and it’s an angry, mean play. David Ball conveys that in his adaptation and pushes the muscle of the play. The director Roger Planchon, who staged several productions of The Miser, said it was one of the most desperate plays Molière ever wrote. Was Molière beginning to fear his own humor? R.M.: What makes such a serious play funny? D.S.: Molière understood the comedy of tragedy. He liked to find the most pathetic situations, the most difficult situations, and make them funny. That’s one of the things I remember most from having worked on his plays so many times. There’s an odd dance between humor and the darker sides of our humanity that makes us laugh. R.M.: How do you read the end of the play, which seems like such a hasty comic conclusion? D.S.: There’s no end to The Miser. The miser remains a miser. True. But the children have moved on. Their love is a form of revolt against their father. If you don’t look at it as a farce, the ending is a real success for the children. Even though they’ve been hurt and stained by their upbringing, they’re able to foresee a future. R.M.: In David Ball’s adaptation, Harpagon has his own peculiar way of speaking. Is this something you find in the original French script? D.S.: Yes. As I was re-reading Molière’s play, I looked very closely at the language and noticed that Harpagon’s syntax wasn’t right. Molière invented it – and he probably made up some of the lines while he was on stage playing Harpagon. The character speaks improperly because of his miserliness. You would think that since he’s a miser he’d use fewer words. But Harpagon is miserly about everything except his own language. R.M.: Have any actors or directors influenced your perception of this play? D.S.: The French actor and director Jean Vilar was the first to play Harpagon standing up straight. It was a big step. His miser was agile, solid, strong, and alert. Vilar completely changed the way I looked at the character and the play, because he didn’t play an old man. He played a man who has made a choice to be the way he is. R.M.: How did the set design for this production evolve? D.S.: When I first met with the set designer Riccardo Hernandez, I described pictures I’d seen from Cuba of extraordinary old architecture that’s been poorly maintained – even violated and desecrated. We looked at pictures of beautiful eighteenth-century rooms that have been divided in half with concrete blocks. We decided to set the play in an ancient world that refuses to embrace the new. The struggle to sustain a certain way of living without spending any money maintaining tradition seems like a very conservative impulse to me. The great conservatives trash their traditions constantly, and Harpagon is the ultimate paranoid conservative. The set is also designed for tragedy. A tragic space is one that the audience understands from the outset. Our set is a completely open space that doesn’t really change over the course of the production. The journey is not about a quest. It’s about a struggle. Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.