MOLIERE
at the UIC Theatre
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Moliere, by Mikhail Bulgakov, might be more appropriately titled The Last Days of Moliere. The works of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to us as Moliere, are full of tales of old men trying to marry young girls. His plays usually end with the elderly lecher seeing the error of his ways and the natural order restored. Moliere himself, however, decided at the age of 40 to forsake his long friendship with Madeleine Bejart, an actress in his company, to marry the 19-year-old Armande–who Madeleine claimed was her sister, but who may have actually been Moliere’s daughter by Madeleine. Rumors about this question, compounded by the controversy over his satire on religious hypocrisy Le Tartuffe, eventually lost Moliere the king’s patronage and helped cause the collapse of his health and marriage. He died at 51 during a performance of his The Imaginary Invalid.
The passion and sincerity of artists saluting one of their peers, as well as the exultation that comes with the lifting of old proscriptions, is apparent in STM’s performance. The acting style is big and grand, almost operatic, with happiness expressed by roars of laughter, sadness in shrieks of anguish, and anger in bellows of rage–all of which could easily come off as silly and overdone, but don’t. In UIC’s cavernous vault of a theater and against the high-tech synthesizer score by Jean-Michel Jarre, anything smaller would be virtually invisible. Also noteworthy was the disciplined precision of the actors’ movements–when a character falls to the stage, one doesn’t wonder if he has hurt himself, as one frequently does with certain American actors who crash into stage surfaces. Neither are the STM actors afraid to take their time with a gesture–unlike method actors, who seem to think about their action a long time before taking it, these actors make the action begin in the preceding stasis, so that we see the action flow through the actor’s body before he actually changes position.
Gogol’s play tells the story of Podkolesin (played with Tom Sawyer boyishness by Victor Borisov, seen in Moliere as the stolid, middle-aged Registre), a buttoned-down bachelor who has employed a matchmaker to find him a wife, but who develops cold feet whenever matrimony impends. Agafia, his would-be bride, is played by the statuesque and extremely funny Larisa Uromova, an actress who’s also notably larger than her groom-to-be. As the best buddy Kochkarev, himself married and desiring company in his misery, Beliakovich puts his mischievously smirking face to good use. Irina Bochorishvily, the pale and tragic Madeleine from Moliere, is all flinty-faced businesswoman as the matchmaker. Indeed, it is to the credit of the STM actors that one often has trouble recognizing an actor from one role to the next. Nowhere is this more evident than in Aleksey Vanin’s portrayal of Anuchkin the Aesthete–a role as far from his sinister character in Moliere as could be imagined.
There are also several topical references to glasnost and George Bush, and a few jokes pitched to American audiences. When five foolish fishermen catch a huge catfish, they all shout “Jaws!” In another sketch a character claims to have “embezzled a million.” “Dollars?” asks another character. “No–rubles, of course!”
