Billed as a ‘riotous comedy’, this version of Molière’s seventeenth century attack on the quackery of his time proved too limited a canvass, I felt, for the wonderful Tony Robinson. The odd slapstick thrust of an enema, and the odd witty line aside, this felt like a production that had flirted with modernising the old classic, but had blinked at the last minute.
The minstrels, led by singer Andrew Bevis, that opened the proceedings, promised a new satirical take. Wearing contemporary surgeons gowns, they delivered songs with unpleasant titles like ‘Blood in my Poo’, accompanied by guitar and excellent trumpet playing. Behind them the safety curtain was adorned with an enormous blow up of the Gilbert and George piece ‘Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit’. Was this to be another Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors) classic reconstruction? But they were gone all too quickly, leaving us with a largely conventional staging of the play, and leaving us to wonder whether Bean could have taken this old plot and really stood it on a twenty-first century head to much greater effect throughout. As it was, the musicians, when they appeared, had the effect of splitting the production’s personality.
Tony Robinson is always very watchable, and convinces as the loathsome dressing-gowned commode-sitting Malade imaginaire. Misogynistic, self-obsessed, easily duped, Argan is not an easy figure to find sympathy for. Like his scheming wife Beline, elegantly played by Imogen Stubbs, at times one wished the old bugger would just get on and pop his clogs. The script rarely let Robinson off his leash, often leaving the funnier moments to the excellent Tracie Bennett as his long-suffering maid-come-carer Toinette.
The fecal-centred frolics that ensued were always laced with uncomfortable understories of cynical exploitation, and we needed light relief from the socially claustrophobic strictures of seventeenth century mores, and the contents of Argan’s chamber pot. Occasionally we got it. The circulation-denying doctor Diafoirehoea, for instance, asks: “Have you read my treatise on the spleen?” Argan, “I couldn’t put it down.” We could have done with more of that sort of banter. Craig Gazey’s depiction of Thomas Diafoirehoea, betrothed by his father to Argan’s daughter Angélique, was an eerie high point. Looking not unlike a young version of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, his forced and faux humble greetings to his intended genuinely chilled the blood.
Molière correctly attacked the arrogance of the medical profession of his day. Directives are still required to remind the nursing profession to put the care back into caring and doctors told to treat individuals not conditions. Enemas might have become the optional extras of high street beauty parlours, but looking further than one’s own shit always carries a promise of redemption of sorts. ★★★☆☆ Simon Bishop 10/10/14
Photos by Simon Annand
