Tartuffe FAQ
Posted by Marisol Rosa Shapiro on October 24th, 2007 Photo by T. Charles Erickson |
Over the course of the last week I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many Tartuffe audience members both informally and at post-show discussions. Here are a few of the great questions that they have asked about this production of Tartuffe, and here are some of the answers that the actors and I have given. If you have more questions, feel free to e-mail them to me and I will post them–along with their answers–on the blog.
Q: I loved being able to see the actors’ faces up close thanks to Alex Eaton’s video work and the large projection screens on the set—but I wonder what that is like for the actors. How does having the camera in the room affect the actors’ performances?
A: We often think of the art of acting as being divided in two: acting for the stage and acting for the screen. Because the smallest facial expressions and gestures are visible in a close-up camera shot, acting styles for film and television tend to be more subtle and understated than stage acting. Because an actor’s expressions and emotions as performed on stage must reach the farthest reaches of the orchestra and the highest points of the balcony, acting for the stage tends to be more heightened—louder and larger. The actors in Tartuffe act for the stage. Regardless of the presence of the camera and projection screens, they work to make their voices heard and their emotions felt by each and every one of the 1000+ audience members in the
Q. How do the actors feel about speaking in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets?
A. The actors in this production have all expressed their appreciation and love for the verse of Tartuffe. Our production uses the poet Richard Wilbur’s 1968 translation, which is widely considered the definitive one. Wilbur has translated Moliere’s rhyming couplets of Alexandrines (12-syllable lines) into iambic pentameter (10-syllable lines)—the heartbeat rhythm that we are all used to reading in Shakespeare’s work. The actors love the comedy inherent in the rhyming couplet form and how the rhythm of a line can shed light on its meaning or on a character’s emotional state as he or she is speaking. Daniel Fish has also pointed out the special power of the verb in Wilbur’s translation, and the way that the verb often drives the rest of the line. While rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter may seem like a constraint to some, the actors in Tartuffe find that the form gives them a lot of cues that are great for crafting their characters.
Q. The costumes and the set of Tartuffe seem to have both contemporary and 17th-century resonances. Why have Daniel Fish and the designers decided to present a mix of periods?
A. Regardless of the period in which it was written or premiered, a play is an event that happens here and now. For this current production of Tartuffe, therefore, Daniel Fish was interested in exploring both 1664 and 2007. During a recent trip to
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Posted by Marisol Rosa-Shapiro, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre (and assistant to Director Daniel Fish on the McCarter production of Tartuffe). Photo: Daniel Cameron Talbott in McCarter’s production of Tartuffe.
