In the revival of David Hirson's Moliere-styled, rhymed verse social commentary comedy, La
Bête, what's at issue is
the value of sensibility, and which is worthy of our support: that of the true
artist as personified by playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce) or the populist hack Valere (Mark Rylance). The support sought here is that of a Princess
(Joanna Lumley) who has long been the benefactor of the first, but, having been
taken with the performance of the second at a street fair, is intent on adding
him to the palace troupe. The play would seem to stack the deck in favor of Elomire (an anagram of Moliere), because the entrance of Valere heralds a 20 minute monologue of
divinely oblivious self-absorption, marking the
hack as a social boor to boot. But a certain degree of irony awaits.
In
the play's premiere (1991) producton, directed by Richard Jones, the role of Valere was
played by Tom McGowan (it's the performance that put him mildly on the map and
led to his playing the bumbling radio station boss on Frasier). In most individual ways, Rylance (who made his splash two seasons ago with Boeing Boeing), in league with director Matthew
Warchus, does a far superior job. They have a better grasp of how to deliver comedy, its
nuances and rhythms; wheras both Jones and McGowan had favored the pushy, affected
school of funny, which spends a lot of energy insisting how funny the material
is via indicating and underscoring; rather than being genuinely funny by dint of real human
behavior deftly exaggerated. Not only is Rylance in particular naturally funnier, he's slyer, more
subversive, and easily a star, while Mr. McGowan came off as precisely what he
was: a very able understudy who took over from a departing star (Ron Silver) out of town.
So
why, why, why, I wondered, did I find
myself missing Tom McGowan so much?—I actually posted the query on Facebook, it so bugged me. In his response, my friend
and fellow critic Peter Filichia nailed the reason I could not: because Warchus
and Rylance have turned Valere the boor into Valere the pig: They have the
character burping, spitting food, picking his nose, farting, even shitting into
a chamber pot, to prove just how “low end” he is. It's expert low comedy, but
it clouds the play's central issue, which is not one of manners but of taste and who gets to
define artistic standards and decide what the audience can see; and conversely,
what the audience demands vs. the higher level they might aspire to; in short,
about mediocrity that insinuatingly panders versus excellence that nourishes and even
challenges, a thesis that might well also extend to other walks of life such as
politics. This is about pitting the work of Sherwood Schwartz against that of
Aaron Sorkin; that of Bobrick & Clark against that of Herb Gardner; The
Face on the Barroom Floor against Death
of a Salesman;
the philosophy and
sophistication of Sarah Palin against that of Ayn Rand—and etc. One
could
argue, I suppose, that the play is also about pitting low comedy
against high (and I'd agree), but I don't think that's sufficient
excuse to justify making Valere such a hopeless bumpkin, for in how
many cases would a
benefactor like the play's Princess be fooled by someone so
irredeemably coarse? (In the original production it was a Prince, by
the way, and played by a grandly foppish Dylan Baker.) Is it not more the pretender, the fatuous mediocrity, who
can obfuscate triviality with grand gesture, who is the true threat to
genuine artistic vision, and the harbinger of cultural decline? Though
all the performers and performances surrounding Rylance are appropriate, admirable and credible, and
though Rylance himself is, as I say, a master clown, the toxic waste dump that
is this production’s version of Valers is an indulgence that comes
at a huge cost to the play's central theme.
La
Bête, I hasten to add, was never a great
play to begin with; it's a competently rendered, amusing and I think largely
academic exercise in pastiching a style of classic theatre, an exercise that
has somehow "failed upwards" since its debut, and one that is an
ironic reflection of its own themes. The shell is an impressive imitation, but
in neither answering nor enhancing our understanding of the age-old conflict it
dramatizes, the fruit within has very little to say that's originally observed
or even freshly spun. Maybe that's why it encourages a certain kind of desperate excess in the key role. At least it's something…