This year, the Gladstone theatre is launching its season with a play that has been making audiences laugh, occasionally uncomfortably, since 1662.
“We still can’t get through rehearsals without cracking up,” lead actor Andy Massingham said. “I find the comedy a bit painful . . . It actually taps into part of our own humanity that we are afraid to laugh at.”
The play in question is David Whiteley’s new translation of Moliere’s School for Wives, which will run at the Gladstone Sept. 12-27.
Director John P. Kelly said he thinks Moliere is underrated in Ontario.
“Shakespeare overshadows classic comedy,” he said. “But in terms of sheer fun and inventive fun you don’t get any better than Moliere.”
The School for Wives tells the story of Arnolphe, a longtime bachelor with plans to marry Agnes, a young girl he has supported and groomed to be an ideal spouse since childhood. This plan is foiled when Agnes meets and falls in love with Horace, the son of Arnolphe’s best friend. A series of misunderstandings ensue in a plot reminiscent of a 1930s screwball comedy.
Massingham said the “verbal slapstick” humour in School for Wives presents a special challenge for actors. The play is in verse, which means every line is also a rhyming couplet, a line of poetry.
“My tongue is learning how to say words next to each other,” he laughed before speaking a few lines of his character’s opening speech:
“These women commit every sin under the sun/And these husbands just let them I know of this one/A prosperous merchant who lets half his money go toward buying gifts for the creeps who are sleeping with his honey.”
Massingham described his character as an obsessive control freak with “mommy issues.” However, he said Arnolphe is not a monster.
“I find him hugely empathetic—not sympathetic that’s a different thing. He’s conflicted, like all great anti-heroes and all great heroes of literature, he’s flawed, he’s complex, and he actually is quite stupid, but he’s a smart stupid man,” Massingham explained.
Massingham said there’s a sense of desperation as well as comedy in Moliere’s play with emotionally charged scenes between Arnolphe and Agnes that “feel like they could have been written today.” He described the story as “terrifyingly relevant.”
Both Kelly and Massingham agreed the new translation adds to the play’s relevance.
“We’re using words that wouldn’t have been around at the time,” Kelly explained. “Dad. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. Even totally.”
“Totes,” Massingham corrected.
“The audience will see the mirror held up to them,” he added. “Every once in a while Dave [Whiteley] will toss in a word or a phrase that’s very contemporary and we’ll go ‘oh that’s us talking!’” he said.
Whiteley himself is also part of the cast in the role of Chrysalde, the voice of reason, a part he said he thinks represents Moliere’s own commentary on the events of the plot.
“Having translated and kind of owning the words that way it’s nice to have any role in it but it seems particularly fitting . . . to be the the kind of voice of the playwright,” he said.
Kelly said the play is ultimately about entertainment.
“It’s important when you’re doing a play that’s a classic that reverence doesn’t take it over,” he said.
“What you learn or what you experience is secondary to having a good night out and this is a good night out.”
