Cast Olivia Auday, Selma Benkaza, Jean-Yves Brignon, Harley de Burgh, Etienne Gauthier, Luc Marin, Victoire Milcamps, Rachel Wach
Directing Jean-Yves Brignon
Light designer Emma Lockhart-Wilson
Set designer Noëlle Rigaudie
Costumes scooting Dram'in French
Technicians Laurène, Mahaut Armand, Félixe Rives
Reception Staff Mahaud Armand
Translation Henry Van Laun
A play by Molière - a play in French with English over titles.
From 5 to 8 April 2016, PACT Centre for Emerging artists, 8pm
George Dandin, a rich bourgeois, married the young aristocrat Angélique. “Let my marriage be a powerful lesson to all the bourgeois middle classes middle classes who desire to elevate themselves in society and to forge an alliance as I have with the house of an aristocrat”, he cries at the start. The parents of his spouse, Monsieur et Madame de Sotenville, accepted this union to restore their troubled finances. They constantly make Dandin aware that he belongs to an inferior special class and that he must be most grateful for this flattering alliance. From her part, Angélique barely hides the fact that she has a gallant or lover from her own aristocratic milieu in the person of Clitandre.
Dandin catches her out in flagrante delicto. She manages to twist things the first time but on the second time when Clitandre comes at night, she finds herself locked out of the house. Defeated, she recognises her fault and begs Dandin to open up. Dandin believes he has won. He needs to cal the parents, but as soon as he does, Angélique turns the tables on him; she enters in the house and this time it is Dandin who is locked outside. When the parents arrive, she accuses him of being a husband guilty of being out all night drinking.
In this way the master of the situation Dandin, becomes its victim. He must offer his excuses whilst the Sotenvilles retort: “if you return, we remind you of the respect you owe your wife and from the respectable milieu from which she comes”. He can only respond in a final monologue: “when you have like me married an evil woman, the best thing to do is to jump in the lake headfirst”.
A fine comedy-tragedy farce of traditional style, the play is a strong social critique on bourgeois arrivistes and the arrogant nobility. This is a black comedy with points of tragedy, centred upon the drama of a man conscious of his failings and who decries: “you wanted it, George Dandin, you wanted it”.
George Dandin
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