I really wanted to call this blog entry "Laughter, the Best Medicine" but that catchy title was long years since nailed down by the Reader's Digest!
Nonetheless, it certainly applies at more than one level to the current Stratford production of Molière's classic farce Le Malade Imaginaire, in an English adaptation by Richard Bean entitled The Hypochondriac. This new version does not beat around the bush, but uses much blunter, earthier language than most preceding translations.
Stratford's association with the works of Molière is a lengthy one, stretching back all the way to the days of the tent, and this particular play was first performed at Stratford in 1958. The 2016 season marks the play's fourth Stratford staging.
Le Malade Imaginaire was actually written, like most of Molière's plays, as a comedie-ballet, with music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. This production hews to that tradition by incorporating several dance numbers at different points in the story, dances which used choreography that is highly suggestive of the period era of Louis XIV.
Like the author's other famous plays, this one contains a rich assortment of characters young and old, but, as always, it stands or falls by the performance of the central male role -- the one Molière himself always played in his own lifetime. In this case, of course, it is the hypochondriac Argan. Not the least ironic feature of this, his final play, was that Molière suffered a coughing fit and hemorrhage while performing in this role, and died a few hours later.
Antoni Cimolino's lively production adopts loosely the conceit that we are watching the fourth performance of the play at the Theatre du Palais-Royal, with King Louis XIV in attendance. The show opens while the Festival Theatre audience is still being seated, with the cast rehearsing bits and pieces in their underclothes, a routine which incorporates bits of dancing and snatches of music from the onstage orchestra (on the upper level). Then chandeliers are lowered, candles lighted, and the chandeliers hoisted back into place. A fanfare announces the arrival of the King (Sanjay Talwar), and he strides down the centre aisle to be seated directly in front of the stage. The houselights go down, and the play proper begins.
This may sound a bit kitschy, but this adaptation does retain the several panegyrics to the King which were part and parcel of the original plays -- and thus the production allows the actors to address His Majesty directly, as they probably did in 1673. It also allows the King to come onto the stage and join the actors in one of the dances, another well-known Louis XIV habit.
Despite its imposing name, the Theatre du Palais-Royal was actually a rather rundown and dilapidated old hall in Paris, in which the play had to be performed on an improvised platform built by the company. Teresa Przybylski's designs, both for costumes and for set, accurately capture the feeling of a production being staged on a financial wing and a prayer.
The script pokes outrageous fun at the various doctors who appear, so the doctors appropriately are given the most outrageous wigs and make-up treatments. None of the big medical wigs go higher, or farther over the top, than those worn by Peter Hutt as Monsieur Diafoirerhoea and Ian Lake as his son, Thomas Diafoirerhoea (a doctor in training).
The same could easily be said of their performances, but that's what the script demands! Lake in particular pushes his character's florid speeches of greeting beyond the bounds of sense or reason, with his rapid fire delivery and assumed village-idiot voice.
Luke Humphrey gives a fine performance as Cleante, the young man who loves Argan's daughter, Angelique. (It was a favourite name of Molière's; several of his plays include characters named Cleante or -- in one case -- Cleonte). Particularly amusing is the singing-lesson scene which Humphrey and Shannon Taylor (as Angelique) make into a textbook example of how not to overplay a ludicrous farcical situation.
One of the stock roles in many of Molière's plays is the wise relative, usually a brother, who sees through the scams being inflicted on the hapless hero. Although these roles can be a little colourless at times, Ben Carlson takes advantage of the script to be blunt to the point of rude, and makes a very good thing indeed out of the role of Beralde.
Trish Lindström has some amusing moments as Beline, Argan's too-young wife, and is particularly funny in her emphatic behaviour when she finds her husband apparently dead.
Molière was unusual for his time, or for any time before the twentieth century, in placing so much emphasis on his servant characters. There are a number of them in each play, but it's always the servant of the duped hero who receives what amounts to principal-role treatment from the author. Not only that, but the servant -- in this case called Toinette -- becomes one of the principal engines of the comedy throughout the piece.
Brigit Wilson gives a memorable comical performance, with strong voice, expressions and gestures all allied to keep the audience fully in tune with her often less-than-polite thoughts about the other characters. Both physically and vocally, this is a strong-willed Toinette who thoroughly knows her own mind and doesn't hesitate to speak it. Wilson, in fact, took the role of Toinette exactly where it needs to go -- making this servant into the complete comic counterweight of Argan, her employer.
And so we come to the centrepiece of the whole show: Argan, the hypochondriac, served up with panache, zest, and sheer goofiness by Stephen Ouimette. Ouimette is one of Stratford's best-known and best-loved veterans, and I suspect it was his presence on the stage more than anything else that drew in a virtually sold-out house on a weeknight. And I say that, fully recognizing that this was the show's official opening performance.
Ouimette certainly didn't disappoint his audience. From comic business with a huge, floppy bedgown to sonorous defences of the doctors who are robbing him blind, he rang all the changes without apparently ever missing an opportunity to add in another nuance. If the Argan isn't right, this entire play can easily lie down and die. Ouimette went considerably farther than just getting it right, and deserved every bit of the tumultuous ovation which greeted him at the curtain calls.
The real strength of this production stems from the numerous bits of amusing comic business -- right from the moment, before the actual play, when a couple of company members destroy an obnoxiously loud cellphone on the stage. This is probably the best integrated "turn-off-your-phones" announcement I've ever seen, simply because there was no announcement -- just a fun piece of comic schtick which was made part of the play. Every other little comic flourish was similarly integrated into and put at the service of the total performance.
The incorporation of dance sequences, as in the original production of 1673, and the use of a small onstage balcony band of woodwind players to accompany the dances, was an inspired way of taking the audience into another time and another convention of theatre. Similarly, the arrival of the King on stage to join in one of the dances became itself part of the performance. Kudos, by the way, to another long-time Stratford veteran, composer Berthold Carriere, for his lovely pastiche of pseudo-Baroque dance music. Even when the show turned dark -- when Stephen Ouimette as Molière playing Argan collapsed after the closing scene -- comedy intruded with Ben Carlson's impeccably timed "Is there a doctor in the house?" -- right after we'd spent two and a half hours watching some of the most incompetent doctors in the history of theatre parade their ignorance across the stage.
I'd love to know how many of these and numerous other little comic riffs were imagined ahead of time and how many were developed during the rehearsal process. One thing's for sure, it takes a director of the quality of Antoni Cimolino to integrate all these and other diverse elements strongly together into a unified whole, where in lesser hands it could easily disintegrate into unrelated comic sketch material.
The audience loved the show, laughing heartily throughout, and I totally agreed with them. This Hypochondriac is a real winner.
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