MOLIÈRE’S THE MISER
WRITER: Translated by Sylvaine Strike and William Harding
CAST: Lionel Newton, Atandwa Kani, Kate Liqourish, William Harding, Mpho Osei-Tutu, Patricia Boyer, Molatji Ditodi, Jason Kennett
DIRECTOR: Sylvaine Strike
VENUE: The Barney Simon Theatre at The Market
UNTIL: December 9
RATING: **** (and a golden baguette)
An aged chandelier creaks down from the theatre roof. A downtrodden servant magically lights an unlit globe with cupped hands. His master, the vinegary Harpagon, sneaks in and extinguishes it.
Illusion and reality, the past and the present, go hand in hand in The Fortune Cookie Theatre Company’s audacious reconfiguring of theatre lore. The key to Sylvaine Strike’s method of taking a French classic penned in 1668 and unleashing it on a South African audience in 2012 is in the programme note about the “cross-cultural genetics” that fuel her and her company’s signature ebullient performance style.
This explains the hilarious hybridity which gleefully gobbles accents and cultural archetypes to produce a theatrical patois brimming with tragicomic pyrotechnics.
In its direction and staging, this incarnation of The Miser is Molière unplugged and hot-wired to trigger a comedy of irreverently exaggerated manners and enduring human truths.
The director and her collaborators have developed a solidy crafted Morse code for mime, movement and gesture. There is a very fine line between satiric bite and overdone comedy, but the uniformly excellent cast do not fall into any traps as commedia dell’arte clowning meets Le Coq’s corporeal eloquence and robust South African ingenuity.
This feast of irresistible wit lies not only in the interpretations, but in Sarah Roberts’ costumes (Frosine the matchmaker’s handbag-festooned gown deserves its own curtain call along with the magnificently versatile Patrica Boyer), the intimate set and Dean Barrett’s eclectic soundtrack score. The design, while suggesting 17th century extravagance, tends to reveal the bare bones, the artifice behind the art.
The dastardly Harpagon, brilliantly realised by Lionel Newtown in a haunting performance of Sherlockian proportions, suspects everyone is out to rob him. When he is in the drawing room (with its little carpet, period seat and embroidered footstool) the curtained walls groan and whisper, heightening his paranoia.
The characters burst in and out of the performance space, or are simply embalmed in velvety memory.
Miss Molière’s The Miser and you are sacrificing the South African production of the year (any year).