“I hate them because they’re obscene, big bastards, and because they get along with the obscene.”

Four hundred years after the birth of Molière, Alceste still roams the theater court of Louis IV, roams the bourgeois salons of Paris, roams the halls of the palace and observes the hypocritical behavior of the aristocrats of the 17th century. He listens to their lies, flattery, mean comments and reacts with disgust to their intrigues, intrigues, arrogance and arrogance.

The Misanthrope by Molière (The Misanthrope, 1666) is an absolutely positive character. He hates people not because he is an evil and capricious character, but because he sees how corrupt the people around him are. In the play directed by Lefteris Voyatsis in 1996, Alceste holds a camera and watches dramatic faces through it. Then he becomes aware of hatred, lies, fraud and corruption. Alceste would very much like the world to be moral and just, and the moral shortcomings of people to be investigated and corrected. But when he realizes that this is not so, he hates people for not conforming to this vision of humanity. Since for him “nature never speaks with false ornaments,” he organizes his “misanthropy” as a kind of defense, as well as an attack or an expression of despair in the face of the moral decline around him. Alceste, like Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, deciphers and exposes everything around him.

Maria Maganari directed this difficult work of the Molière Gallery with skill, sensitivity and inspiration, covering all aspects of the “serious comedy” (sérieuse comédie), a mixed genre where the comic coexists with the dramatic, and sometimes acts as a peripheral artery of the story. urban drama. It brought out all the satirical facets of the work, the ones that made 17th-century audiences come out of the play irritated because they so clearly recognized themselves in Molière’s performance. He freely transferred the action to the Greek society of the 1990s and allowed the modern viewer to judge and think for himself whether the “mortal wounds” tyrannizing “Infidel” have been healed. This made him, with humor and poignancy, seek his place in a system of relationships based on proximity and distance, familiarity and alienation, weighing meanings between “then” and “now.”

The 17th-century audience came out of the play alarmed because they recognized themselves in what the author was criticizing.

In the mobile, flexible and charming stage space of the Tision Theatre, which was staged by Filanti Bugatsu in a simple way, Maganari also achieved a dialectical connection between measured translation and direction. Her performance was a play on words, a priceless performance by Chrysa Prokopakis. Molière’s rhyme retains the “patina” of antiquity, as precious antiques retain their glaze, so that its charm can be more pronounced in a modern environment.

The actors used an interesting scale of interpretation and brought the comedy to a dramatic unfolding when Alceste chose solitude and paid the price for his misanthropy, which is nothing less than his solitary life. Kostas Koutsolelos, the excellent Alcest, interprets the obsession with honesty, truth and selflessness with a special vocal technique. He has the air of an intellectual, but also of a vulnerable man in the arrows of love. Syrmo Keke, in the image of the dynamic secular lady Célimène, the object of Alceste’s desire, belongs to the world of debauchery and mixes two female images: a diabolical widow who enjoys life without a shadow of prohibitions, and an amorous woman who enjoys the love game in her multi-colored bunk bed. Kostas Koroneos, in the complex role of Filan, interprets the model of a cultured person (honnête homme) with stylistic measure and acting content. Yiannis Klinis, as the dishonest and hypocritical Orodes, aptly portrayed the arrogant character of the type that Alceste hates. The charismatic Vangelis Ambatsis filled the stage with the movement and flair of his transformation into Marquis Acasta. Maria Georgiadu performed the emotionally unstable Eliade with great care. Marquise Clitandre Paola Kalliga is lively and modern, and Arsinoe Magnanari is magnificent, stylistically and kinesiologically worked out to the smallest detail of the role.

The play “Misanthropos” at the Theater “Tision” is an important lesson in directing a classic work and, despite the dystopian dramatic meaning of the work, I believe that it also conveys an optimistic message to the modern audience, condensed into a couplet: “Let’s look graciously at human passions.”

* Ms. Rhea Grigoriou is a Doctor of History and Drama at AUTH and Professor of Greek Culture at EAP.