Chapter 33 - Molière on the Modern Anglophone Stage

Summary

This article illustrates the paradoxical position that Molière occupies in contemporary English-speaking culture: at once absent and omnipresent, little known by the general public but enjoying a select place on the British stage. Molière’s success in Britain over the last few decades has been due to the use of strategies to reduce the gulf that sometimes separates the original plays and the expectations of the English-speaking public. Numerous translators have sought to accentuate their socio-political relevance. However, their relocalisation and the addition of modern cultural references have often been merely a pretext for increasing their burlesque content and introducing quips and puns, thereby making them more commercial. Domestication can be seen also in the transformation of the alexandrine into a verse form that emphasises rhyme to add still more verbal humour. Of the ten adaptations produced by the National Theatre in London, each in its own way contributes to the debate surrounding the ethos of translation. Should Molière translations preserve the original or endlessly reinvent themselves to make the public laugh, as the dramatist himself sought to do? Most translators from the second half of the twentieth century knew to which camp they belonged.