Revered poet/playwright Tony Harrison has revived his sparkling verse translation of Moliere’s ‘The Misanthrope’ for a second collaboration between Bristol’s big two. Steve Wright finds his rhythm.

To me, verse is like a life support system. You take it with you into dark feelings, use its form to contain them. In the theatre, it’s a way of controlling momentum, emotion, darkness, humour and tragedy – everyone shares the same rules of metre but uses them in different ways.” Tony Harrison, one of the most revered poet/playwrights of the last half-century, is telling Venue why verse has always been the only medium for him. “I’ve written everything I’ve done – poetry, plays, films – in verse,” he continues. “For me, verse comes out of the blood, out of the heartbeat.”

Harrison is perhaps most famous for his long, earthy, state-of-the-nation poem ‘V’, written during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and describing a trip to see his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery “now littered with beer cans and vandalised by obscene graffiti”. Its shocking language and imagery brought front-page denunciations in the Daily Mail and questions in Parliament – but the newly founded Independent printed the entire poem in its news section, and ‘V’ is now taught in schools.

In theatrical circles, Harrison is also hugely admired for his translations of classic drama, from the Greeks to the great French dramatists and onward. A high-water mark was his sparkling, witty 1973 verse translation of Molière’s ‘Le Misanthrope’, staged at London’s Old Vic and starring Diana Rigg. And it’s this translation that Harrison has now updated for the second-ever collaboration (after last year’s hugely accomplished ‘Uncle Vanya’) between Bristol Old Vic and Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory.

Probably Molière’s best play, and certainly his most subtle and reflective, ‘The Misanthrope’ is a biting, playful satire on the hypocrisies and vanities of the social elite. Alceste, an aristocrat, is passionately in love with the flirtatious, image-obsessed Célimène, but reviles the intrigues and insincerities of the fashionable world she dominates. Alceste’s quest is to try to persuade Célimène to retire to a life of rural simplicity and sincerity, while remaining unsullied by the gossip and power-wheedling of life at court. Other memorable characters include the pompous, insecure Oronte, who asks Alceste to give his opinion on an appalling love sonnet, and is outraged by the latter’s sincere verdict; Eliante, Célimène’s cousin, who initially pines for Alceste; and Arsinoé, a moral older woman who becomes jealous of his attentions toward Célimène.

“Some of the greatest theatre is in verse form,” Tony says. “I have always made heroes of the poet-dramatists, from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides through to Shakespeare, Molière and Racine and onto Goethe, Schiller and Lorca. Molière is one of the very greatest, and ‘The Misanthrope’ is his greatest play. It has an edge to it – some of his plays are nearer to farce, and this has that element at times but also a darker, almost Chekhovian air of desperation and loneliness.”

He’s making some updates from his 1973 translation, and this new SATTF/BOV version is set in a latter-day France, in the inner circle of power and influence surrounding president Nicolas Sarkozy. “A great classic needs to be continually retranslated. That’s how the classics live – they find new levels and new emphases. ‘The Misanthrope’’s essential themes, of social convention, flattery, gossip and influence, are timeless. In 1666 when the play was premiered, proximity to the court and the king was how everybody got power and influence. Now, you have to find a modern-day political equivalent – which would be the inner circles of Bush, Blair and Sarkozy.”

Harrison has previous with Bristol Old Vic. His ‘Misanthrope’ was revived as a joint National Theatre/BOV production in 1989 – and Harrison met his partner, actress Sian Thomas, at the Old Vic, where she played Célimène. This new version will be directed by SATTF’s Andrew Hilton, whose subtlety, clarity of storytelling and attention to language and meaning has made such rewarding spectacles out of every one of SATTF’s 23 shows thus far. Alceste will be played by Simon Armstrong (a fine Vanya last year), with BOVTS graduate Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Célimène and Lucy Black (SATTF’s Cleopatra last year) as Arsinoé. In a nice case of art mirroring life, Tony reveals that Molière himself, a hardworking actor as well as playwright, played Alceste in the play’s first run, with his wife as Célimène, his mistress playing Eliante, and Arsinoé played by “the one woman in the company who wouldn’t go to bed with him!”

“‘The Misanthrope’ has always been a favourite of mine, because it appeals to my sense of humour but somewhere it’s also got this shadow in it,” Tony concludes. “There is a darkness and a desperation to the play: people are being made unhappy by all these conventions and social niceties, this desperate need to know who thinks what about whom. We have it in spades now with Twitter and Facebook – this constant need to know what people think of you. When that’s mixed up with political influence, it becomes dangerous.”

THE MISANTHROPE IS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC TO SAT 23 OCT.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010; pics copyright Toby Farrow 2010

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