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Moliere beyond reach

"For in the age in which we live, nothing is given for nothing," confides Arnolph to the audience. Investment and return obsess him; commercial principles control his personal "contracts"; he spends money, time and calculation instead of warmth on Agnes, falsely convinced that his profit will be the perfect wife, ignorant, chaste and unworldly. The School For Wives (Moliere, directed by Sandy Black, Downstage Theatre) is concerned to demonstrate comically that something can be given for nothing, for his commercial means achieve for Arnolph only the agony and pathos of recognition that trust and love cannot be bought. Or rather this is what the play should demonstrate, but somehow fails to do so.

I wonder if this production doesn't show instead that the bond between theatre and audience cannot be bought. If the relationship between a theatre and its public is to be of any value at all it should surely be one which derives not from detached entertainment—we "enjoy' the evening, laugh a little, have a night out—but from some kind of emotional or mental participation in the play.

Because I remained sceptically outside the action of The School For Wives I am tempted to ask whether or not Downstage was this time trying to buy its audience with a not very subtly provoked laughter.

The programme note defends—or rationalises? —its choice of play in this way: "When this play was first produced in 1662, it shocked the moral defences of a good many people and, in the best sense of the word, it should still do so." In terms of my experience of the play, however, the claim remains unsubstantiated. It may be that my "moral defences" are developed to an unhealthily impenetrable degree (if so pity help me). but it may also be that the writer of the programme note does not have a clear conception of just what kind of play is capable of shocking these.

One accepts the conventions of comedie de caractere. Character in the Shakespearean sense of the word gives way to character sketched from selected points of view. Dramatic action is confined to a series of "incidents" that lead to a resolution in which the central character is exposed in some way. This mode is a purposely limited one. The School For Wives, however, seems to be unforgiveably static. After Arnolph's declaration to heaven—with baroque music —at the end of the first half we expect to move on to new things, but are treated instead to a repetition of the Horace-Agnes-Arnolph complication, while the ending is resolved so rapidly that we are scarcely allowed even then to share in the pathos of Arnolph's situation.

One is also prepared to accept a convention of stylised movement, but if one is adopted it should be practised with a fineness which gives it an artistic validity of its own. The opening mime sequence promises such fineness, but as the evening goes on the movement becomes repetitive and gross —too many characters making gestures too large for such a small stage. Brobdignagian strides in a Lilliputian area make for clumsiness, not comic finesse, while set tremors, a tree that wobbles, and hats that are knocked off mistakenly by actors and set alike mar the comic illusion. There are moments of great humour—Peter Bland reaching out to find the step (the first time), Stephen O'Rourke in the cudgelling sequence sitting up, eyes straight ahead, in an endearingly (if out of place?) Beatles' gesture. Raeburn Hirseh and David Weatherley in their quieter moments and before we have seen too much of them. The notary interlude, on the other hand, is a moment of vocal and visual noise that is nothing more than offensive.

And again, if costuming is to be semi-stylised it should be so without being shoddy. Such things as the notary's curled plastic hair in blue, and the sent-up sumptuousness of the men's costumes (Horace's folderols determinedly refusing to remain with the rest of his costume) worry the eye, making it difficult to suspend one's disbelief even tenuously in this comic world. The easy superficiality of the plot then, is paralleled by a too unsubtle handling of the visual aspects of the play.

There are times of involvement, and Peter Bland is largely responsible for these— Agnes's admission that Horace has stolen ... her ribbon, when Arnolph's relief is both comically and seriously felt, and Horace's early revelation to Arnolph when, forced to laugh at himself, he does so with huge difficulty. But in the face of the odds I have already talked about the excellence of individual actors is considerably reduced. On the whole, the comic competence of Peter Bland, Raeburn Hirsch and David Weather ley is hindered by visual untidiness and repetitlveness of gesture. Susan Wilson and Stephen O'Rourke charm, but lack the vitality which a closer acquaintance with the style, or a more clearly defined style, could have given. Brian Brimer, Walter Pym and Graham Leggott provide a comfortable background for the final scene.

If "nothing is given for nothing," true fori the 17th century, still applies in the age in which we live, then perhaps more thought should be given to the value of the returns we get from the something we give. Raw laughter, not in this case a "prelude to reflection' (programme note, again) is perhaps not enough.

Josephine Knight