Word: dandin
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Bear Baited. The new production ot Georges Dandin has been both praised and hated for an approach that "makes a Marxist out of Molière." The revolution comes in the inner citadel of the French classical tradition, the 17th century jewel box of Richelieu's theater at the Comédie-Française itself, where Molière played the lead before Louis XIV in 1668. Georges Dandin is an early farce, today often left to the schoolroom, about a rich peasant who has married above himself, is cuckolded by his wife and humiliated by her pretentious...
Butt, cuckold, buffoon-Hirsch gives Georges Dandin the engaging dignity of self-knowledge, the man who says his own name with the rueful shake of the head that makes it ring through the play like a bell, the shrewd peasant who knows he has made a bad bargain in a wife, the naif who thinks he can prove it to the parents from whom he bought...
...clarity of the social conflict makes all the little details spring alive. The stylized stark setting puts the barnyard in front of the house, puts the in-laws and the aristocratic lover into a flat beige and gold of costume, complexion, hair-proud wigs. Against them all, Dandin's shaggy authenticity strikes out like a bear baited by spaniels. When at last Dandin finds the house empty at night and locks out his wife, the creaking stock situation leaps up with delight while Dandin exults...
When she gulls his simple human sympathy, then extorts a groveling apology the wrench of comic truth lies even in the last unconscious gesture with which Dandin the peasant, stumbling away, stubs out the candle in his barn with bare fingers. Hirsch's is a rare and flawless performance, a French tradition made...
...George Dandin, is the decorous tale of a wealthy farmer who is all but cuckolded and constantly humiliated by his upper-class minx of a wife. The only novelty provided in its performance is an acting style that is resolutely anti-psychological. Each role is lustrously burnished; none is probed. No transistorized translation is offered with these plays, and to those who lack French, the language may sound like an LP record played at 78 r.p.m...