Word: moli
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...Molière was a foe of zealotry, and an apostle of moderation. He regarded the extremist as society's sickest man. Each of his better plays is a kind of psychosocial profile of a man with a raging obsession, a feverishly disordered imagination. He may be a hypocrite, a miser, a misanthrope. In Molière's view, such a man is as mad as a man who claims to be Napoleon; the only cure is a cascade of laughter and the bracing tonic of common sense...
This cure is abundantly present in a splendid Broadway revival of The School for Wives. The 309-year-old play bubbles with caustic merriment. A large debt of thanks is due Richard Wilbur's deftly idiomatic verse translation. Rendered into pedantic English, Molière's rhyming couplets can drone on with a perishing cumulative monotony. Wilbur makes the meters dance, and the players follow...
...with horns on the brain, Brian Bedford is a comic marvel. His face is an ever-changing panorama of unholy glee, bottomless despair, and a sour-pickle sneer. With an unbroken, intuitive authority, he leads the way to the vital intersection of Molière's genius, the place where la vie tragique meets la vie triviale. The ultimate humanity of Molière is that he can make an audience laugh at a man's folly, then make the audience feel how that foolish man suffers, and finally make us all realize just who that suffering fool...
...Denying complaints that his government is spending too little on cultural affairs, Pompidou answered a newsman who urged him to be "a prince who loves the arts" with a paraphrased riposte from Molière's Tartuffe: "I am a prince who hates deceit...
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...