The Laughing Cure

By T.E. Kalem

Moliere 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 Moliere'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, Moliere's rhyming couplets can drone on with a perishing cumulative monotony. Wilbur makes the meters dance, and the players follow.

The fanatic flaw in Arnolphe, the protagonist of Wives, is that he is a wildly jealous man with a horrible fear of being cuckolded. Arnolphe (Brian Bedford) has had his intended wife Agnes (Joan Van Ark) posted to a convent from childhood, and now keeps her isolated from society in a town house guarded by two watchful servants. Arnolphe's master plan has been to keep Agnes innocent in body, and blank of mind. A young gallant wrecks the plan. Horace (David Dukes) catches sight of Agnes, falls in love with her, trysts with her and eventually wins her to wife. The cream of the jest is that he enlists Arnolphe as a coconspirator, and that wariest of foxes helps to outfox himself.

As the man 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 Moliere's genius, the place where la vie tragique meets la vie triviale. The ultimate humanity of Moliere 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 is--us.

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