Théâtre du Nouveau Monde revisits Molière farce

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L'École des femmes

• Written by Molière
• Directed by Yves Desgagnés
• Starring Guy Nadon
• At the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal
• 2 STARS

Blanche- Neige & La Belle au Bois Dormant

• Written by Elfriede Jelinek
• Directed by Martin Faucher
• Starring Sophie Cadieux
• At Espace Go in Montreal
• 3.5 STARS

The Théâtre du Nouveau Monde was born in 1951 with a production of L'Avare ( The Miser) directed by Jean Gascon – and ever since the Montreal theatre company has been married to Molière.

L'École des femmes, which opened the TNM's 60th season last week, is either their 49th or 50th time tackling the 17th-century French playwright, depending on how you care to count.

Generally translated into English as School for Wives, this comedy concerns a paranoid misanthrope – but not The Misanthrope – named Arnolphe (Guy Nadon), who has long avoided marrying out of a fear of being cuckolded. His plan to avoid that fate is fairly drastic: He adopted the poor, young Agnès (Sophie Desmarais) at age 4 as his ward and has had her raised in cloistered ignorance by nuns, groomed to be a perfect, loyal wife for him.

This being a comedy (primarily), Arnolphe's best-laid plans go awry on the eve of his wedding with the arrival of the son of a friend, the handsome Horace (an unaccountably dreadlocked Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard). As poet and translator Richard Wilbur aptly wrote, the play is about "life's happy refusal to conform to cranky plans and theories."

For all its farcical elements, École des femmes starts from a dark premise and contains a provocative thesis – that sexual insecurity is at the root when men keep women away from knowledge and under a veil (as Agnès is). A recent production in Quebec City by Jean-Philippe Joubert – obviously, but nevertheless daringly – moved the action to a modern-day Muslim country.

At the TNM, director Yves Desgagnés seems happy to only superficially address these themes and delivers a neutered, somewhat nebulous production. His emphasis is, dispiritingly, on the play as a play. He nods at different theatrical styles in various scenes, notably staging Arnolphe's encounter with the notary with commedia masks; the action all takes place among a set of nested proscenium arches with red curtains designed by Martin Ferland.

In Desgagnés's conception, Nadon plays an actor – perhaps himself – who stumbles upon the TNM stage and then must survive the nightmare of having to perform the lead role on opening night without knowing his lines. When he's delivering Arnolphe's theory that stupid women make the best wives in the first act, Nadon is engaged in distracting meta-theatrical business, running about putting on his costume and delivering his lines haltingly on purpose. (He occasionally consults a script brought on by a stage manager.)

Once Nadon is allowed to settle into Arnolphe, he gives a very likeable – perhaps too likeable – comic performance that emphasizes his character's mental fragility, while Desmarais, an otherworldly beauty, skillfully charts Agnès's transformation from a blank-eyed Stepford fiancée to independent thinker. Around this pair of solid performances, however, there is a lot of schtick, particularly involving Arnolphe's servants Alain and Georgette (Pierre Collin and Louison Danis).

A dozen or so blocks up Saint Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, a more challenging and contemporary exploration of the oppression of women, even by women themselves, came in director Martin Faucher's sensational, scenographically stunning production of Blanche-Neige & La Belle au Bois Dormant ( Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) at Espace Go.

These aren't straight adaptations of the two fairy tales but a pair of the philosophically dense and cynical "Princess Plays" by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek.

Quebec theatre has suddenly exploded with interested in Jelinek, who is best known (if at all) in the anglosphere for her novel The Piano Teacher, which was turned into a dark film by Michael Haneke. Last season, video-theatre artist Denis Marleau staged the Canadian premiere of Jackie, another Princess Play that concerns Jacqueline Kennedy and will soon tour to the NAC's French-language theatre.

That Belle-Neige & La Belle au Bois Dormant – which has now, alas, closed – was a hit is not entirely a surprise given the presence of the extraordinary actress Sophie Cadieux, a thirtysomething star of stage and screen in Quebec, as both a Snow White in shorts so short they might better fit a dwarf and a Sleeping Beauty who stumbles around singles bars hoping her prince will come.

The production was, in fact, the brainchild of Cadieux who is in the first year of an unusual three-year residency at Espace Go.

Cadieux and Faucher cleverly linked Jelinek's two short pieces into a cohesive one-act by having Snow White, after she comes to a violent end, transform into Sleeping Beauty. Max-Otto Fauteux's set, which stays the same, resembles a shopping mall at an airport, with magazine and romance-novel racks at one end and changing rooms at the other,

Both plays are essentially an exchange of long monologues between the titular princesses and their male counterparts. In the first, Cadieux's robotic sex-object of a Snow White engaged with the Hunter in a life-or-death debate that probed the incompatibility of beauty and truth.

I found Sleeping Beauty the more interesting (and comprehensible) of the two. Here the princess's slumber is a metaphor for women who feel their lives have no meaning until a man enters it. When the Prince arrives, however – played by a wonderfully arrogant Éric Bruneau – he believes that by waking her, he has also become her Creator.

By combining break-neck delivery with burlesque style, Cadieux rendered all this intensely watchable. Faucher's visuals were always impressive, the production ending memorably in mad mayhem with the sodden, somnambulistic Sleeping Beauty dancing at a sex club in a giant bunny/vagina costume next to an inflatable pig that fills half the stage. Okay, this may be papering over Jelinek's words with shock, but it did feed the plays' themes, I think – or at least it turned what might otherwise be tedious talk into a thrilling, terrifying spectacle.

L'École des femmes runs until Oct. 29; Blanche Neige & La Belle au Bois Dormant has ended its run.