What’s up, doc?
THE HYPOCHONDRIAC OWES MUCH OF ITS SUCCESS TO ITS LEADING MAN, STEPHEN OUIMETTE
Molière’ s The Hypochondriac is famous as the comedy whose author-star, a far from imaginary invalid, collapsed on stage at the fourth performance, dying that same night because the doctors he had been mocking refused to come to his aid. That’s a pretty hard act to follow, and I wouldn’t want any production to try. Still, the legendary circumstances of that original run may have given the play a critical status in excess of its actual merits.
Or so I’ve often thought. In what was — of necessity — his last play, Molière was re- cycling a formula he had used many times before: middle- aged monomaniac wants to marry off his daughter, natural or adopted, though she’s in love with somebody else. The obsessive protagonist may, in previous plays, have been a jealous guardian, a religious fanatic, or a miser. Argan, the central figure here, is miserly, but he’s principally a man in rude health — the jokes about this are especially rude — who fancies himself at death’s door, and wants to have a doctor in the family.
It had always seemed to me that a static satire on the medical profession and its victims was being padded out by a conventional and perfunctory love- plot. Antoni Cimolino’s Stratford production comes closer than any before to changing my mind.
The success owes something to the choice of translation and more to the choice of leading man. Stephen Ouimette’s Argan is a self- pitying tyrant who somehow remains likable. There’s an innocence about his delusions, a toughness too. He’s never hysterical; he simply cannot conceive that anyone could disagree with him, even though nearly everybody does. And in fact, on everyday subjects, he can be quite hard- headed; the most delightful parts of Ouimette’s performance are his deviations, abrupt but seamless, into common sense; this includes his ability, almost unheard- of in classic comedy, to see through another character’s disguise. He’s also quite moving when some of the scales fall from his eyes. Everything about this performance is delicately done, but it still lands with maximum force. Or, given Ouimette’s supremacy in the genre, maximum farce.
Delicacy is not perhaps the quality one most associates with t his play. House- calls and pharmaceuticals don’t seem to have come cheap in 17 th- century France, and Argan’s opening speech finds him resentfully counting the money he’s spent on lotions, pills and enemas. Especially enemas. They seem to work: Argan’s frantic excursions offstage to relieve himself become a running gag ( if that’s the expression I want) that Oui- mette manages to make palatable ( again, if that’s the word I want). It happens more frequently and more explicitly in Richard Bean’s adaptation than in Moliere’s original, but Bean, who made Goldoni live again in One Man Two Guv’nors, is only following where his master led him. He goes furthest perhaps in bringing on stage an outsized fully- operational anal pump.
He also supplies a steady stream of really funny lines, along with some that merely try to be, and makes the love- interest more interesting, and more entertaining, than I would have thought possible. Also more class- conscious: Molière’s Cleante, wooing Argan’s daughter Angelique, is no gallant in particular. Bean makes him an apprentice in a factory that has made Argan rich but that he never visits. In the evening’s most dazzling scene, Cleante disguises himself as Angelique’s music master, and the two of them improvise a comic opera, singing their love while deceiving their audience; the idea is Molière’s, the development Bean’s, and the performances entrancing. Luke Humphrey and Shannon Taylor renew their chemistry from Shakespeare in Love, with Taylor adding a top-class soprano.
There’s a fine quorum of quacks: Peter Hutt, David Collins, Rylan Wilkie and, as the prize idiot who’s Argan’s designated son- in- law, Ian Lake in a mountainous wig, declaiming his contempt for such newfangled notions as the circulation of the blood. As Toinette, the indispens- able managing maid, Brigit Wilson is needlessly strident, and as Beline, Argan’s scheming second wife, Trish Lindstrom leaves me wondering, for the second time this season, where her subtlety has gone.
She may well have felt though, that subtlety would be wasted on her role in this adaptation, which makes Beline not just rapaciously eager for her husband’s demise but having it off on the side with the lawyer who’s preparing his will.
This is one of Bean’s less happy alterations; a better one comes when Argan is confronted and berated by his commonsensical brother Beralde, to whom Ben Carlson brings his customary vigour and lucidity. In the original Beralde is contemptuous of all doctors; here he has a certain respect for science, reserving his scorn for what we would now call alternative medicine.
The play also gets a new frame. Molière was persecuted by the clerical establishment of his day but protected, to some extent, by King Louis XIV, to whom he paid glowing, even cloying, tribute in Tartuffe. The production’s conceit is to present the play as a command performance at court; we get a pre- show, the company going through their choreographic paces as they first await and then salute the royal arrival. It seems as if the play proper will never start, but the delay pays off with a surprise horizontal entrance by Ouimette.
From time to time thereafter, the players interrupt the action and go into full sycophantic mode, delivering interpolated panegyrics to the monarch, to whom they refer every time by his full name and number, as if he needed to be reminded. Molière ended his play with a masquerade, a kind of dream, in which Argan, his faith in medicine undimmed, is inaugurated into the college of physicians, becoming doctor and patient in one. This is generally thought to be a brilliant satiric conclusion though in performance it always comes off as aimless and anticlimactic. So it does here, but this time it isn’t the climax.
There’s an ending after the ending. Now it’s true that to appreciate it you have to know, from the program since the production doesn’t make it clear, that the actor playing Argan is supposed to be Molière and the actress playing his daughter is his young wife Armande. ( Was Molière the Woody Allen of his day?) If you do know this, the evening ends with a bang.
I won’t give away the details, but if I say that at this point the play meets i ts legend you may well guess them. It’s powerful and sobering anyway. The preceding production is uneven, but it has the pace and gusto of Cimolino’s recent work in comedy. It isn’t, Ouimette’s title performance apart, in the same league as The Alchemist last year. But then neither is the play. In repertory through October 14.