Already in the opening scene, the spectator has to pay the price: “You have been set up”, bites the cynic Alceste at the Tilburg premiere audience, which, in his opinion, could have opted much better for a safe evening in front of the TV. “You have shown too little backbone.” His loyal friend Philinte, who with his fixed smile is “doomed to unconditional love” (a wonderful role by Joep van der Geest), tries in vain to calm Alceste down.
Of Mission Moliere – free to The man hater (1666) by the French comedy writer Molière – director Sarah Moeremans and author Joachim Robbrecht catapult a classic towards the modern age according to a tried and tested recipe. They previously did this with work by Henrik Ibsen and with age-old legends. It produces cheerful meta theatre, in a distorting mirror palace full of decadent chandeliers and lampshades. The characters are aware of the fact that they are playing in an ancient play, but they are unable to escape it.
For Alceste – who is averse to any form of showiness, artificiality and theater – it is by far the most objectionable. He sees acting as perhaps the ultimate consequence of opportunism and deceit: pretending to be someone else, in the full awareness that everyone is aware of this artificiality. Meanwhile, he sighs, he has been rejected by the woman he loves for more than three hundred years. He sneered at the audience: “Isn’t it nice to watch that?”
Also read the interview with the makers: “Molière will be happy with this radical adaptation”
Unvarnished honesty
Not only the public, everyone becomes a victim of Alceste’s unvarnished honesty – including himself. Nice and painful – because recognizable in the discomfort – are the scenes with Oronte (Alicia Boedhoe), in this re-translation a singer-songwriter who is not so much devoid of talent, but unfortunately deals with mediocrity. Alceste’s tear when listening to one of her thousand-of-one numbers is one of “restrained vomit,” he declares.
Alceste is played wonderfully by Louis van der Waal: insufferable but still very cuddly. He is in love with Célimène, who is portrayed with fierce venom by Julia Ghysels and who has made polygamy an art of living. The running gag of Célimène is hilarious, who proclaims that she is going to write a letter every time she leaves the stage. Alceste, with increasing frustration: “You just go off!”
Arsinoé is also wonderful, an initially marginal role (“I was almost scrapped,” says Keja Klaasje Kwestro) that culminates in a vulnerable hand to our times: “Adopt me,” she begs the audience. She’s waiting at the artist exit.
take hold
Plenty to laugh about in this smooth comedy, which shows that Alceste certainly has it no easier in this modern influencer era than at the French court of the seventeenth century: there is enough fuss and boasting to turn away from.
Nevertheless, the performance does not make a lasting impression. Perhaps the many fine meta jokes and the exalted game obscure the intentions of the makers: it is clear that Mission Moliere– following the source text – wants to tell us something about cynicism, hypocrisy, sincerity and appropriateness, but what exactly?