Molière’s Don Juan may not be, as has been claimed, this dramatist’s greatest work. Le Misanthrope and Tartuffe are, to my mind, better plays. On the other hand, Don Juan is certainly a good specimen of baroque theatre, with its mixture of farce and tragedy and its introduction of the supernatural, so the choice of play by the newly resuscitated Teatru Manoel Players for performance during the Valletta International Baroque Festival was a good one in some ways.
From a stylistic point of view Gatt is most successful in his direction of the first scene between Don Juan and his father Don Luis
Chris Gatt, who directed it, chose to give it a contemporary Maltese setting with an unremarkable Maltese translation by Immanuel Mifsud and an elegant, unrealistic set by Romualdo Moretti. Projections on the backcloth of Maltese scenes and English surtitles, projected on the movable flats, worked very well, though the frequent trundling in and out of the wings of the flats was a trifle irritating.
Gatt rightly opted for realistic acting in the comic scenes, whereas scenes involving Elvire, especially the first one, are much more stylised. From a stylistic point of view, Gatt is most successful in his direction of the first scene between Don Juan (Jes Camilleri) and his father Don Luis (Manuel Cauchi), where the old man preaches boringly at his libertine of a son, but his mind is clearly on what he reads on his smart phone and on signing documents. The strong touch of realism in this scene brings out most clearly Gatt’s wish to show how his goodies are not as admirable as they think they are.
Don Juan is not only a libertine but also an atheist, as he tells his faithful servant Sganarelle (Pierre Stafrace) but no one else.
Sganarelle is meant as a counterbalance to his master, as he is a devoutly practising Catholic, but Molière’s contemporaries were shocked by him, since his Christianity is of a bigoted and superstitious sort. No wonder his little sermons to his master make no impact at all on him. Sganarelle was meant to be one of those servants typical of 16th- and 17 th-century comedy, a figure hovering between farce and comedy, sometimes in commedia dell’arte style.
One of the production’s weaknesses is that Stafrace is too restrained in the comic scenes. Sganarelle is comic not just in what he says, as in the various lines where he forces himself to approve of his master’s villainy, but has to support his lines with gestures and movements.
Camilleri is an impressive Don Juan, the coldest of sensualists and a committed philosopher of profligacy. He is the only character in this production to wear costumes of some extravagance, as well as a wig that he loses, disclosing his grey cropped hair as his fortunes deteriorate, and his utter amorality makes him plough through any opposition to his actions. He therefore needs Sganarelle to remind us time and again that, even if the servant is superstitious, such things as moral principles do exist, no matter how brilliantly Don Juan may argue against them.
Sganarelle is also the voice of Molière’s beloved comedy. He laughs whereas his master sneers or hypocritically smiles, and in his unsophisticated way he weeps at the misfortunes of those same people whom his master so mistreats. The dramatic contrast between master and servant needs to be brought out in stronger comic terms than in this production.
Apart from Sganarelle’s criticism, the main indictment of Don Juan is left to Elvire, whom we first see as a woman racked by the knowledge that she has abandoned the religious life for a ruthless womaniser. When we see her again she has now decided to go back to being a nun but, her love not quite spent, she still tries hard to appeal to him to convert at the 11th hour. Coryse Borg puts some life into a part that is two-dimensional and she handles her long speeches with much power.
Molière wrote this play for a society in which courtiers believed in honour and in wiping out dishonour with a duel if need be. The scenes between Don Juan on the one hand, and Don Alonso and Don Carlos (brothers of Elvire, whom Don Juan has abducted from a convent and then married) on the other hand, are dramatic ones and need to be performed with conviction and panache so as not to fall flat, as the first scene did.
Aaron Fenech and Claudio Carta remained two-dimensional throughout, and the first scene in particular was melodrama of the coarsest sort. In Molière’s original, Don Juan wears his sword most of the time, whereas in this production he never wears any arms at all, not even when he rushes off stage to rescue Don Carlos from the bandits who are attacking him. The trouble with modernising the play is that in Molière’s day, aristocrats were always armed, whereas nowadays it is the habitual criminals and mafiosi who always carry a weapon. Modernisation has to be much more thorough than in this production.
Of the comic scenes, the only one that truly succeeded was that involving the two fishing-village girls, Charlotte (Marisa Aquilina) and Mathurine (Magdalena van Kuilenburg), whom Don Juan tries so hard to seduce. Both of them brought that element of low, comic realism the play needs at this point.
What the direction lacked here was the technique to make Don Juan’s desperate attempts to persuade each of the two girls that he meant to marry her and not the other comically convincing. Daniel Azzopardi’s Pierrot, the fisherman Charlotte has half-heartedly promised to marry, had life in him, and merited our regrets when Don Juan humiliates him and beats him up.
The Commander’s statue and Don Juan’s end as the flames of hell engulf him pose another problem to the moderniser. In this production, the Commander’s statue takes the form of a projection of the well-known bronze statue of Grand Master Vilhena – I liked the idea of the theatre’s founder finding himself somehow on its boards – but the famous nodding is done by a flesh-and-blood actor in a modern suit, and the same actor it is who comes to the Don’s dinner and then comes back to take him to his death.
As this actor is Cauchi, who also plays Don Luis, the hint is that at the end it is the older generation that provides Don Juan with his comeuppance.
The statue comes back to haul Don Juan away only after the libertine’s declaration of intent to stop presenting his usual defiant front, become a hypocrite and reach the end of his life as a fake but convincing goody.
Gatt avoids presenting the gates of hell by making Don Juan the victim of the many people he has deceived and ruined. Even his death, however, is harmful to someone. As Sganarelle looks down at his master’s corpse he laments: “My wages! My wages!”
Molière brilliantly brings in a touch of black comedy to the final curtain of this extraordinary work.