Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The career strategy of an actor turned playwright: 'de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’
- 2 The material conditions of Molière’s stage
- 3 The master and the mirror: Scaramouche and Molière
- 4 Molière as satirist
- 5 How (and why) not to take Molière too seriously
- 6 L’Avare or Harpagon’s masterclass in comedy
- 7 Laughter and irony in Le Misanthrope
- 8 Comédies-ballets
- 9 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Molière and music
- 10 Medicine and entertainment in Le Malade imaginaire
- 11 Molière and the teaching of Frenchness: Les Femmes savantes as a case study
- 12 L'École des femmes: matrimony and the laws of chance
- 13 Molière nationalised: Tartuffe on the British stage from the Restoration to the present day
- 14 Landmark twentieth-century productions of Molière: a transatlantic perspective on Molière: mise en scène and its historiography
- 15 Dom Juan the Directors’ Play
- 16 ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’: modern experimental theatre’s debt to Molière
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
16 - ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’: modern experimental theatre’s debt to Molière
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- 1 The career strategy of an actor turned playwright: 'de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’
- 2 The material conditions of Molière’s stage
- 3 The master and the mirror: Scaramouche and Molière
- 4 Molière as satirist
- 5 How (and why) not to take Molière too seriously
- 6 L’Avare or Harpagon’s masterclass in comedy
- 7 Laughter and irony in Le Misanthrope
- 8 Comédies-ballets
- 9 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Molière and music
- 10 Medicine and entertainment in Le Malade imaginaire
- 11 Molière and the teaching of Frenchness: Les Femmes savantes as a case study
- 12 L'École des femmes: matrimony and the laws of chance
- 13 Molière nationalised: Tartuffe on the British stage from the Restoration to the present day
- 14 Landmark twentieth-century productions of Molière: a transatlantic perspective on Molière: mise en scène and its historiography
- 15 Dom Juan the Directors’ Play
- 16 ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’: modern experimental theatre’s debt to Molière
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
The contributors to this volume have demonstrated the impossibility of approaching Molière without also reflecting on how we read and view his work, how we understand it and construct a model of what it means for us. For example, Ralph Albanese has shown how advocates of laïcité in nineteenth-century France found meanings in Molière's work to fit their educational project of building a modern secular French identity. Noöl Peacock has demonstrated how Tartuffe has been appropriated by different British theatre companies as they develop their own cultural discourses - most notably in the case of Jatinder Verma's intercultural project with his 1990 production at London's National Theatre. Charles Mazouer has reminded us that a whole aspect of Molière's comédies-ballets (which represent almost half his output) has been neglected for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the wake of the classical music industry's promotion of baroque music. Like Shakespeare's oeuvre, Molière's has a protean quality, and each succeeding generation discovers a new Molière in its own image. The purpose of this last chapter in the Cambridge Companion is to explore some of the ways in which theatre reformers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have rediscovered aspects of Molière that mirror their own preoccupations and have found that one of the most effective methods of researching and developing new approaches to the art of theatre is through productions of his plays.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Moliere , pp. 215 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006