L'École des femmes review – MeToo times add bite to Molière comedy
Suzanne Aubert makes quite some entrance. The first minutes of Stéphane Braunschweig’s production of Molière’s School for Wives, first seen in 2018, are a slow build-up for the big reveal. In a modern-day gym, Claude Duparfait’s Arnolphe has laid out his creepy scheme to bring up a girl in such seclusion that he may marry her, certain she will be faithful.
We’re desperate to see the victim of this social engineering and, when the vast curtain dividing Alexandre de Dardel’s Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe set is pulled back, we are shocked. Aubert is lying across a bed, idly cutting strips of cotton, her T-shirt scarcely reaching her knickers, her bare legs coyly kicking the air.
This Agnès makes Arnolphe appear not only as a foolish control freak but as a dangerous sexual predator. It is all our #MeToo anxieties at once.
As knockabout comedies go, this one is uncommonly alarming. Indeed, Braunschweig, whose Measure for Measure toured the UK in 1997, gives the whole play a rare psychological depth. He pushes beyond the stock characters of impotent old man, innocent virgin and clean-cut hero to offer something more subtle.
Yes, Arnolphe remains a figure of fun. With his trim suit and bended knees, Duparfait plays him like a man comically uncomfortable in his own skin. Yet he also comes across as genuinely distressed by the unravelling of his plan. You almost feel sorry for him.
Aubert’s Agnès, meanwhile, is every bit the modern woman. Her response to Arnolphe’s patriarchal opinions is to laugh uncontrollably. Who needs a big speech to reply to views so patently absurd? Inexperienced she might be, but she is a woman in charge of her own destiny.
• L’Ecole des femmes is available to watch online with English subtitles at vimeo.com/327310297.
