A Comedy of No Manners: Jean-François Regnard
The wild and witty playwright behind THE HEIR APPARENT’s source
“Whoever doesn’t enjoy Regnard doesn’t deserve to admire Molière.” –Voltaire
Onstage November 8 through December 16, 2018, at Lantern Theater Company, The Heir Apparent is a deliriously funny comedy about something we’re not supposed to talk about in polite company: money. But The Heir Apparent, and the 1708 comedy upon which it is based, have no time for such niceties. These comedies of no manners are too busy with jokes, disguises, and pratfalls to concern themselves with the rules of decorum.
While the modern quips of The Heir Apparent are thanks to its translator and adaptor David Ives, the play’s wild and ribald spirit comes courtesy of Jean-François Regnard, the 17th century French playwright who wrote the source material: Le Légataire universel. Regnard was a successor to Molière, taking the lessons of that master and putting his own cheeky spin on them. And his high spirits were not just confined to his writing; Regnard’s wild life was fit for the stage.
Regnard was born into a rich bourgeois family in Paris in 1655. As a young man, he lived an adventurous and somewhat untethered life, traveling Europe and collecting experiences that would later come in handy for his writing career. When he was 22 and returning from a trip to Italy, he was kidnapped by pirates, sent to Algiers, and sold as a slave in Constantinople. He worked as a cook until he was ransomed a year later. When he returned home to France, he hung his slave chains on his wall and turned his experiences into a novel. Although these writings were not published until after his death, his career as a writer was born.
Regnard’s kidnapping did not deter him from adventure; he continued to travel extensively throughout Europe for another two years. Upon his return to Paris, he worked in the Treasury of France and bought a home in Paris and an estate on the outskirts of the city. He wrote and wrote, churning out at least 18 comedies over 20 years.
While ensconced in Parisian cultural life and laying down roots, his wild nature found outlets. At his estate, he hunted, feasted, and partied with friends. He consecrated his home to Bacchus, the god of wine and fertility. He remained unmarried and continued an active outdoor life amidst his prolific theater career. Even his death is a bit outrageous: while some stories say he overexerted himself hunting while sick, others believe he was poisoned. Still others claim he prepared himself a dose of horse medicine, likely believing he could handle the intense medication, but died from it instead. No one knows for sure.
Perhaps this somewhat unruly life led to the rowdiness of his comedies of no manners. He began writing in the waning years of Louis XIV’s reign, amid an atmosphere of hopelessness and worry. His plays are a repudiation of that, a brash and sometimes coarse invitation to laugh with and at the customs and nobility of the day. Molière was interested in character and human nature; Regnard inherited the master’s wit and turned it outward toward what one critic called “bold selfishness…the joyous corruption of the time.” Regnard was less interested in exploring why things were the way they were than he was in finding the jocular and jovial humor in its absurdity.
Le Légataire universel, written just one year before his mysterious death, was Regnard’s masterpiece. It is a story of a miser and the people who love his money nearly as much as they love each other. But Regnard does not judge his characters, nor try to root out the cause of their unmannerly behavior; he heightens them instead, exploding their foibles into comic fireworks.
In his introduction to The Heir Apparent, David Ives says that Regnard lived his life with “buoyancy.” This is also an apt descriptor of Le Légataire universel, which Ives describes as “worldly, utterly honest, satirical without being condemnatory, often bawdy, sometimes scatological, now and then macabre, and it craves jokes like a drunkard craves liquor.” Ives maintains this devil-may-care approach to politeness and morality in his adaptation. After all, who has time for manners when there are pirates to escape, bets to place, and feasts to host? Not Regnard, not his characters, and not the people Ives turns loose in The Heir Apparent.
The Heir Apparent is onstage at the Lantern November 8 through December 16, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
