Alceste, the man who confesses he’s “uncomfortably prone to speak his mind” about injustice and fakery, argues back for unrestrained honesty in life—whatever the cost:
No, we must be merciless in our
tirade
against this pseudo-civil mas-
querade.
Let real feelings shine out
through our speech,
a deep sincerity where guile
can’t reach,
not pretty compliments, but true
regard,
open, not hidden in some slick
charade.
The “slick charade” is Mr. von Hove’s studiously “controversial” production, with its videocams, BlackBerrys and computer notebooks on show like a window display at Computer World. Lest Molière bore us, there’s an anime cartoon playing to entertain us during Acaste’s renowned, smug speech about the joys of elitism. (Mr. van Hove is also the umpteenth director to use cellphones in a classic play.) The entire production is decked out with his reductive, hackneyed theme that technology isolates us all. But the technology distracts the audience and swamps the play.
In the name of poor old Molière, Mr. van Hove has given us his own play—and it’s a virtual reality.
The video screen that dominates one wall of Jan Versweyveld’s gray, minimalist set in turn dwarfs the actors. We could be in a soulless office; the cast is barefoot and costumed in trendy black and white. Two other figures in black function as video artists who film most of the performance through the transparent walls of the set. The play is simulcast like the outdoor quarrel—but the image on the screen is jarringly and deliberately out of synch.
Another symbol, perhaps—but of what? Other stuff appears onscreen, some of it shot previously and not necessarily connected to the action onstage. Various cast members in the backstage dressing room are filmed casually reading a newspaper or having a drink; we can also watch the play continuing backstage (with the stage itself left empty); or there might be a lingering close-up of an actor.
Film can do one big thing that theater never can: It can reveal the mystery of the human face through close-up. Mr. van Hove has invoked Ingmar Bergman’s films in interviews about his new production. But as a film director, he’s a crude amateur comparing himself to a genius.
No one’s saying that a new production of a classic play must be purist, or a museum piece in period costume. (Think of the wonderful innovatory video work of Robert Lepage.) Nor is Mr. van Hove’s production by any means the first experimental Misanthrope. (Martin Crimp’s 1999 Classic Stage Company’s version was set in contemporary London with Uma Thurman as Célimène, music by the Pet Shop Boys, and knowing references en passant to Derrida, Barthes and Andrew Lloyd Webber.) But, among much that’s questionable and histrionic about Mr. von Hove’s production, he’s given us a bad movie onstage—the messy equivalent of visual noise.
In one of the play’s funniest scenes, Molière has Alceste demolish a romantic poem that’s been read to him by its young author who admires Alceste’s honesty (and also fancies Célimène). “Jesus wept!” Alceste finally erupts:
It’s bloody rubbish, rhythmically
inept,
vacuous verbiage, wind, gas, guff.
All lovestruck amateurs churn
out that stuff.
It’s formless, slack, nauseating
scrawl,
and riddled with stale clichés;
that’s not all.
Alceste is a born critic, and I’m tempted to conclude with his devastating gall (and that’s not all). Decency urges that I try to play Philinte, his civilized moderate friend. But in the end I’m with Alceste—I say the von Hove production is spinach, and the hell with it.
