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THE ROYAL COMEDIANS
(MOLIÈRE). WRITTEN BY MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, TRANSLATED BY CARL AND ELLENDEA PROFFER
ON STAGE JULY 24
Russian master Mikhail Bulgakov delves into the opulent world of eighteenth-century France with an extraordinary consideration of the life of French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière. Dramatist, actor, theatre manager, lover, and scoundrel, Molière shrewdly crafts his own legend while battling the forces that hunger for his downfall.
Directed by
László Marton
Featuring Akosua
Amo-Adem, Derek
Boyes, Raquel
Duffy,
Michael Hanrahan,
Stuart Hughes, Qasim
Khan, Sarah
Koehn, Courtney
Lancaster, Justin
Many Fingers,
Diego Matamoros, Hannah
Miller, Gregory
Prest, Paolo
Santalucia, Michael
Simpson,
William Webster and Daniel
Williston
Background Notes
by Soulpepper Associate Artist Toby Malone
Mikhail Bulgakov is best remembered today for his novels, including the towering Master and Margarita, but in The Royal Comedians he has left us with one of the most enduring allegorical history plays ever written. Known variously also as Molière or A Cabal of Hypocrites, Bulgakov's play is a biographical tribute to a theatrical legend, while simultaneously serving as a critique of governmental interference with the arts.
Bulgakov was a great and ardent admirer of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, the actor-manager known simply as Molière. Bulgakov borrowed anecdotes from Molière's life to illustrate his own biography, carefully studied his dramatic style, and in The Royal Comedians, offers a dramatic retelling of his life story. What is interesting about The Royal Comedians is that, despite its breadth, it is a very simply structured play, with a strong through-line and no extraneous plots, which means that Bulgakov actively mimics the unified French dramatic structure as followed by Molière.
Much like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Bulgakov wrote his magnum opus in response to what he saw happening in the society around him. Living in Stalinist Russia, Bulgakov watched the systemic suppression of artistic expression, which was comprehensive yet selectively blind to certain favourites, cripple a once burgeoning theatrical culture. Certain theatres survived, provided they toed the party line, and when they fell out of fashion, so too did their mandate for freedom. It is remarkable that Bulgakov was able, under the watchful eye of Stalin's regime, to write about his hero Molière while simultaneously critiquing the very society under which he lived: Molière represented Bulgakov himself, while the arrogant, fickle King Louis XIV reflected Stalin. The fact that Stalin was a great lover of The Royal Comedians, apparently with no concept of the insult afforded him, shows the quality of Bulgakov's craftsmanship.
Soulpepper welcomes master director László Marton back to revisit a play with which he has had stunning success in the past, most recently at the Actors' Theatre of Louisville.