The Marriage of Figaro
By Beaumarchais
Company B Belvoir
Opera House Drama Theatre
REVIEW BY MARK STOYICH
This is a terrific production of a classic play, which begins brilliantly, ends brilliantly and is pretty good in between, too, with only occasional flat bits.
The Sydney Olympic Arts Festival is providing a surprising number of new productions of very old works (pre-19th century), the most notable being The White Devil by John Webster, William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and this Marriage of Figaro. The only new work appears to be Barrie Kosky's There Is No Need To Wake Up.
Meanwhile we have this, the most important play by 18th century France's very own Barrie Kosky, Beaumarchais. He, like Kosky, was a bourgeois who knew how to shock the bourgeoisie. (He never bored them, however.)
Most people know the story behind Marriage of Figaro, how it was banned by Louis XVI (the king seems to have been more upset by a reference to the Bastille than anything else) but eventually produced to enormous acclaim (people died trying to get in to opening night), especially by the class it most attacked. Later, Mozart's opera of the play was also banned for its subversive message, and also produced to acclaim, championed by Queen Marie Antoinette. France's ruling class may not have known what was good for them, unlike ours, but they could certainly appreciate a good piece of theatre.
The wiley servant Figaro (Jacek Komon) works various ruses to prevent his master, Count Almaviva (played by stand-up comic Austen Tayshus, of all people) from exercising droit de seigneur over his betrothed, Suzanne (Leah Purcell), with the aid of the long-suffering countess (Helen Buday). People hide behind sofas, under beds and in cupboards, they jump out windows to escape detection, they dress in the clothes of
the opposite sex, they meet in gardens in the dark and mistake each other for someone else, until virtue triumphs.
It isn't easy to make this very long play work, and I have sat through productions that bored the bourgeoisie rather than shocked them. The reason this one works is the spot-on comic timing of the principals (with the exception, strangely, of Tayshus).
But the biggest reason it works is that the adaptors, Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush, have resisted any urge to give the play a spurious relevance to modern society by introducing contemporary concerns. Only once, during Figaro's strange long monologue about the ups and downs of his life and the problems of dealing with the high and mighty, does the production slip (Komon refers to the "sorry" word), but that's it.
Old works have to be given some sort of credit for their own integrity, and to drag in our own obsessions is like a pistol shot during a concert. A classic will always have something more important to offer than "relevance".