Close to the end of his life, one of Molière's enemies lampooned him, and accused him of being a hypochondriac. Knowing he was dying, Molière wrote a play to turn both his own tragedy and his scorn for doctors into a comedy. This play was ‘The Imaginary Invalid”
The play starts with the undying hypochondriac Argan (Tom Middleditch) exhausting his time worrying about all of his cellular processes and bodily functions and also worrying about how he is going to pay to keep these processes going in order to keep himself alive. As the play unwinds, it is revealed that Argan’s plan is to marry off his daughter Angelica (Ashley Adamson) to the son of the famous doctor, Dr. Diafores (Jeff Stubbs), who happens to be the nephew of another famous doctor, Dr. Purgon (Nick Green), who happens to be a medical student himself, named Thomas Diafores (Douglas Scott Bates) in order to ensure lifelong treatment of all his imagined ailments by not one, not two, but three doctors who would be glad to treat their family member for free.
However, Angelica, a young and beautiful bachelorette, is appalled by her husband-to-be and enlists the help of the maid Toinette (Katie Siney) in persuading Argan to overlook his plans, and his manipulative wife Beline (Kate Humble) to let her marry the man of her dreams, Cleante (Mitch Pollock). Angelica and Toinette are finally successful after convincing Argan that instead of needing to get three doctors in the family, he can himself become a doctor, because doctors don’t really know anything anyways.
Having previously studied commedia dell’arte, and with the knowledge that Molière was influenced heavily by this form of theatre, I had a greater appreciation for the story and the text, the masks, the costume, and the boldness infused in the blocking of the piece, but less respect for the actors themselves.
The story draws somewhat from the commedia stock characters and is basically based around the story of the two lovers, in this case Angelica and Cleante, the female lover’s father, Argan, traditionally called Pantalone, who was a miser, paranoid that everyone was trying to steal his gold (exploited by the doctors), and gullible (influenced by his wife), as well as Dottore (personified by both Dr. Purgon and Dr. Diafores), the doctor, a man in an upper-class position who appears to be wise, but really knows nothing about anything. The text was great because not only did it pretend to feature a lot of improvisation, such as Cleante and Angelica’s love ballad on the fly, but also made room for a lot of genuine improvisation with the stubborn master-bitchy servant dynamic. The masks made the connection with commedia dell’arte sincere. They reminded the audience not to pity this old man who was being swindled by intimidating doctors in gigantic fedoras, as it is one big show with the purpose of entertainment in mind. Not only did the masks generally have this effect, but specifically, in this production, it was as if the director was telling the audience that “the bigger the mask is, the less seriously you should be taking the character”. The most outrageous characters such as the lawyer had a half mask, the main characters such as Argan, who also had their own eccentricities, had nose masks, and the lovers, in keeping with commedia tradition, and almost as if trying to convey a sappy message, wore no masks. Though the costume did not keep with the traditional commedia colors, trivialities in costume such as the lovers’ complementing color schemes and Aragan’s extremely pale wardrobe was still nice. The bold blocking, such as the shattering of a glass and Argan’s gymnastic display in his chair, left the actors open to a great deal of potential of error which they would have to improvise solutions for.
With all they had going for them, on the whole I felt that the actors fell short. They did do well individually, however, in my opinion, they didn’t work well enough together. Some actors such as Kate Braidwood who played Louise, the young daughter, and the lawyer did well, but some, such as David Ward who played Beralde and Ashley Adamson who played Angelica disappointed. As for the main character, as the father Argan, Tom Middleditch did well on his own on stage in monologues, but when interacting with other characters on stage, he was too selfish and would upstage them. The mediocre acting was not bad enough to be detrimental to the performance. I enjoyed the show, and I feel that I now better understand Molière and understand why he is known as “one of the world’s greatest writers of comedies.