Monday, June 14, 2010

Dubya is Long Gone But the BDS Malady Lingers On

A brand new translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope is set to open in London's West End. Guess who gets to be the titular character? The National Post reports:
A new translation of Molière’s comedy The Misanthrope, set around George W. Bush’s White House and commissioned by Kevin Spacey for Britain’s Old Vic Theatre, is finally getting its premiere far from its intended stage, at Vancouver’s Jericho Arts Centre.

Spacey’s Old Vic production was called off in 2006 after that production’s director died, and the new adaptation by British playwrighting legend Tony Harrison was set aside until Vancouver director Toph Marshall asked Harrison about staging it with the United Players.

“It’s either ridiculous dumb luck or just my happening to know the script exists,” says Marshall, also a University of British Columbia classics professor. He got to know Harrison when his wife Hallie wrote her doctoral thesis on Harrison’s work.

“Tony has been very good to us and I’m really grateful.”

Molière’s play tracks the hypocrisy and self-delusions of a group of 17th-century French court insiders...
Well, if he really wanted to be edgy and au courant, he would have situated it in today's White House and tracked the current batch of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Either that or they could have done an update of the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers:

Hooray for B. Obama,
Café au lait "messiah."
He's always reachin' higher,
Hooray, hooray, hooray...

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