The Misanthrope
Comedy
Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets. Shakespeare toyed with this idiom in some of his early plays, then ditched it altogether. Noël Coward, who could turn a rhyme, restricted its use to comic ditties. Those examples should be a pretty clear No Entry sign to modern writers but Crimp has driven straight up the dead end.
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