Men and women behaving badly in the original ‘seat com’: the art of comic performance in Le Misanthrope

Abstract

Stage directions are rare in seventeenth-century theatre. Molière's later plays have more than most, but Le Misanthrope is still sometimes produced with a fixity which has led the theatre critic, Olivier Schmitt, to make a play on the spelling and French pronunciation of the anglicism ‘sit com’ in order to emphasise the lack of action in certain classic productions, where the stage is crowded out with tabourets for the sake of local colour.1 Le Misanthrope is actually quite a lively play. The classification ‘comedy of manners’ does the text a disservice, making it sound as dry and dated as the institution it mocks, which was already past its prime in 1666. Le Misanthrope is more accurately described as a comedy of bad manners, where everyone is as rude as possible, and the women often upstage the men, even in the bad behaviour stakes, in a way that has become very fashionable in comedy of late. The semiotics of farce and disguise, the source of so much of Molière's humour, is less visible in this society play than in the rest of his theatre. The mask is lifted to reveal more of the comic actor's face and allow freer movement of the head in performance, as one character confronts another, face to face, issuing a string of insults, or criticises the way that others speak behind their backs. Le Misanthrope, presented by some as virtually unplayable, deserves to be recognised as heralding a major advance in performance technique, with implications for the evolution of acting methods in the following century in both England and France. Furthermore, in the crucial debate about the expression of the passions which was just breaking in the art world, Molière may be shown to be a much more important figure than has previously been recognised.