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LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME. Comédieballet by Molière, with music by Jean-Bap tiste Lully. Directed by Denis Podalydès, musical direction by Christophe Coin. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris. 23 June 2012.
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is generally regarded as Molière's most "integrated" comédie-ballet. There is a certain irony, then, that Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord's production wound up showcasing France's own struggles with integration. Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote Le Bourgeois gentilhomme as a comédie-ballet for a lavish court spectacle in 1670 at the order of King Louis XIV, who had requested an entertaining Turkish masquerade after a strained visit from an envoy of the Ottoman Empire. The result is the story of Monsieur Jourdain (Pascal Rénéric), the buffoonish cloth merchant who longs to become a "person of quality." Jourdain finally achieves his fantasy of acquired social status when he is falsely given the title "Mamamouchi" during the comédie-ballet's farcical climax. Act 4's la cérémonie turque is an absurd Orientalist spectacle of dervishes, turbans, and carpets in which characters mock the Turkish language and Islamic prayer. Molière even calls for using the Koran as a comic prop (although this production refrained from doing so). Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was written as France was beginning its colonial ascendancy, but had not yet claimed large swaths of land with Muslim residents. What does it mean, then, to stage the same work in contemporary postcolonial France? Jourdain's foibles offer splendid opportunities for linguistic and physical hilarity during the first three acts; however, in a country with about 5 million Muslims and an immigrant population that often seems socially alienated and...