Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

The plot is a complicated cross-dressing charade. The young Princess Léonide inherited a usurped throne from her father and has been haunted by the fact that it rightfully belongs to one Agis, who was orphaned and brought up in the country by the sage scholar Hermocrate and his sister Léontine. Both siblings have lived celibate lives, renouncing love, and they raised Agis to view it with the same mistrust. He has been kept away from the world and specifically from the society of women. He has also been taught to view the princess as his mortal enemy. So when Léonide determines to restore her kingdom to Agis, the only way she can gain access to Hermocrate’s rural estate is to dress as a man. She arrives accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Corine, who is also passing as male. But Léonide’s motivation isn’t entirely altruistic: she has seen the handsome young Agis and fallen in love with him at first sight. Her plan of action is to fashion a galloping fantasy that keeps changing as circumstances force her to improvise. At first she presents herself to Hermocrate as a student who seeks his tutelage and to Agis as a male companion. Then she confesses her love to Agis, but when Hermocrate figures out her true gender she proclaims that he's the object of her adoration. But the young woman she unmasks to both men is also a fictional creation. Only Léontine continues to think she’s a young man who has fallen in love with her. As in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, the truth doesn’t reveal itself until the final scene, after Marivaux has proven his satirical point: that resisting Cupid’s power is folly.

The Huntington production, directed by artistic director Loretta Greco using Stephen Wadsworth’s excellent adaptation (from a translation by Wadsworth and Nadia Benabid), is deftly staged and very handsomely appointed. (Junghyun Georgia Lee designed both the set and costumes, Christopher Akerlind the lighting and Tom Watson the hair, wig and make-up.) And it has a game, talented cast led by Allison Altman as the princess and Nael Nacer and Marianna Bassham as the middle-aged brother and sister who take about five minutes to renounce their anti-erotic principles. The first act is charming. Greco has coached Altman and Rob Kellogg (as Agis) to treat the quicksilver, unraveling chains of dialogue as spontaneous babble that serves the task of justifying their irresistible libidos. Avanthika Srinivasan’s Corine and Vincent Randazzo and especially Patrick Kerr – as the servants on the estate whom Léonide must bribe to keep them from spoiling the masquerade – also get in on the fun.

Allison Altman and Rob B. Kellog. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

The charm runs thin in act two, unfortunately, for two reasons, one technical and one emotional. By then we’ve gotten the point that Marivaux (or at least Greco) is employing the cascading language to comment on the foolishness of the characters and we want to listen to what they’re actually saying. But everyone on the stage except for Bassham and Kerr suffers from what I think of as operatives disease. They accentuate so many words in a line (for example, please don’t report me to my master) – voice teachers call these operatives – that the listener’s brain gets scrambled; you have to reform the line in your head to make sense of it, and after an hour of doing so you’re exhausted. Even the reliable Nael Nacer falls victim. The production cries out for a persnickety vocal coach.

The other problem is that Greco doesn’t make enough of an effort to find the emotional authenticity in the text. I enjoyed its playfulness but I kept waiting for those moments when the actors would win through to some real emotion, and they are sparse. Bassham has a few, and Kerr’s Dimas the gardener has a surprising one when, after the princess promises him a substantial sum of gold for allying himself with her, he muses dreamily on what it would mean for a peasant like him to have enough cash to afford to buy a small farm. The Triumph of Love skirts the line between romantic machinations and cruelty; Léonide’s manipulation of the susceptible siblings runs the risk of being seen as an example of the latter. Perhaps that danger influenced Greco’s decision to keep the proceedings as light as possible; after all, we don’t want to walk away from the show hating its protagonist. But the result is a superficial reading of a magnificent text.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.