Theatre des Bouffes du Nord Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Published on May 26, 2015

Rating:

Genre: NCPA

Dates: June 10-13, 2015

Prices: 100, 200, 320, 400, 480, 580

Features: From June 10 to June 13, Theatre des Bouffes du Nord Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme will perform at Drama theatre of NCPA during the Beijing International Theatre Festival 2015.

BRIEF INTRODUCTION

The magnificent paradox of The Bourgeois Gentleman lies in the bringing together and celebrating of the Arts for the benefit of a man who listens to, sees and applies himself to the most beautiful things without ever understanding any of it. Not because he is stupid. It's as if he is forced into ignorance since he cannot be the person he wants to become. After all, the distinctive feature of a nobleman is that he is a nobleman by nature; he does not attain the rank by virtue of science or mastery of a skill. In the moral and physical battle that Jourdain wages in order to become a gentleman, he comes up against two powers which are themselves antagonistic. One of them is his family: his wife, his maidservant, his daughter who is about to be married. This is his very life, the bourgeois life, concrete, real and realistic, calculating, self-interested. Jourdain strives to make them hear, feel and touch what he can never make them touch, feel or hear, because he, like his wife and daughter, is and always will be a bourgeois from Porte Saint-Innocent. The other no less daunting power is the nobility. A commoner by birth, he can only ever “haunt” the nobility, that is, associate with them, imitate their ways — their inimitable manners —, learn what a gentleman knows — know that which cannot be learnt — be near noblemen, buy them but to no avail, fall in love with a marquise, offer her a diamond, a sumptuous meal, a ballet, the most expensive dishes: the gap is always there, he is always deceived, the grand dream is always elusive, and his wife, who doesn't dream, is always there to pick him up again. Molière is merciless on this score. Yet the Jourdains, husband and wife, are one of the most beautiful couples he ever created.

But our bourgeois gentleman has an endless capacity for astonishment and wonder. Augmented by his amorous feelings, his contempt for his own bourgeois status and his desire to be somebody else, this capacity enables him to brave all ridicule until finally, after a series of comical misadventures, not least becoming a Mamamouchi, that most extreme manifestation of his pretensions, he does, despite everything, achieve his aim. It lasts for the briefest of moments, this celebration, reunion and confusion of the Arts in a comical and poetic fit of excess out of which he emerges as both victim and victor.