Performance review: Trust Me,I’m a Doctor! Or,Faites-moi Confiance,Je Suis Médecin ! by Perry Mills

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Will Edward's Boys do some scenes from Molière about doctors in 2022?

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No, why?

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Molière was born in 1622.

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No.

According to the programme, thus began the genesis of the show: as a conversation between the initially reluctant director of Edward's Boys, Perry Mills, and the two persuasive leaders of the Printemps des collégiens programme in Montpellier, Florence March and Janice Valls-Russell (note 1). The usual repertoire of Edward's Boys, the renowned all-male student company of King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, is the non-Shakespeare canon of plays written for early modern children's companies. So, there was no question of doing just Molière. Yet, after two earlier visits, in 2016 and 2018, the Boys were scheduled to return in April 2022 to Montpellier, where the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL) was organising a year-long series of events to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Molière's birth. And Montpellier, of course, is famed for its medical history. Thus, the idea of a show focusing on medical scenes was born, which could be performed in Britain and France. The result, Mills writes, is ‘a rich cassoulet of scenes from Molière, early modern English drama and elsewhere’ (programme notes).

The recipe that Mills used to concoct this delicious show contains more ingredients than the famous cassoulet of southwest France: choice cuts from no less than five plays by Molière (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Love Doctor, Dom Juan, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and The Hypocondriac) were simmered with equally savoury pieces from other works, mainly Elizabethan and Jacobean: the anonymous The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600), A Mad World, My Masters (1605) by Thomas Middleton, The Gentleman Usher (1605) by George Chapman, Poetaster (1601) by Ben Jonson, and Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600) by Thomas Nashe. A couple of scenes from a later play by Edward Ravenscroft, The Anatomist, or The Sham Doctor (1697), were also thrown into the pot, as well as an excerpt from a much earlier one, Plautus’ Menaechmi, which provided the foundational recipe for some of the later plays. Even more surprisingly, an excerpt from a twentieth-century Russian novel, The Life of Monsieur de Molière by Mikhail Bulgakov, was stirred into the mixture for the penultimate scene, the playwright's death.

The Boys thus took us on a wild ride of 24 scenes from different countries, eras and authors, interspersed with musical moments. Upstage, a rack and a long table full of clothes, wigs and props allowed the actors to change for each new scene. Between the extracts from the plays, the actors performed five scenes inspired by Commedia dell’arte, all based on a similar pattern of a team of boys trotting onstage to remove the body of an unfortunate victim who had succumbed to ill-advised medical attention. The play opened with one of those scenes, in which the question ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ was repeated in several languages – a question which might have been shouted out when Molière, as the legend goes, collapsed on stage while performing The Hypocondriac and which became a recurrent motif of this production.

As the opening, as well as a choice of costumes (white medical coats) and props (stethoscopes, clysters), made clear, the show revolved around the theme of medicine and doctors. It is well known that Molière did not hold doctors in high esteem, nor did his other European counterparts. Trust Me, I’m a Doctor! is a festival of fanciful diagnoses, fake doctors, and physicians who are as pompous and incompetent as their patients are stupid and naïve. For instance, in Menaechmi and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, doctors diagnose sane patients as insane. In The Hypocondriac, Toinette, a maid, disguises herself as a doctor to impose her own prescriptions on her master Argan.

The overall mood was comedic, frequently over-the-top, culminating with Argan's graduation ceremony that was brought to a close with a spray of confetti from clyster-like, oversized canons. Nonetheless, Mills artfully introduced subtle moments of gravitas, especially appropriate at a time when concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic continue to hover, with a beautiful rendering of Nashe's ‘doleful ditty’ from Summer's Last Will and Testament, ‘Litany in Time of Plague’ (which Edward's Boys performed in 2017; see Lucy Munro's review in Cahiers Élisabéthains, 95[1], 2018, pp. 107–10) and the dramatisation of Molière's death as told by Bulgakov.

Another feature of the show, new to Edward's Boys repertoire, was its multilingualism. A profusion of French, Latin, German, Japanese and other languages, was heard in addition to English. French was particularly prominent, of course, thanks to Molière. The excerpt from Menaechmi was performed in Latin, English, and French by the three actors. The scene from Dom Juan, in which the master and servant debate on credulity in matters of medicine as of religion, was entirely in French, while that from The Hypocondriac was split between French and English. The last scene even included gibberish in Latin, English and French. As a nod to Molière's country, the text of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was altered: ‘If you’re a doctor, I’m Napoleon. And he hasn't even been born yet!’. Italian tunes and the instrumental of Edith Piaf's ‘La Vie en Rose’ were part of the musical score of the play.

As usual, Edward's Boys showed enthusiasm, quality of acting and an amazing professionalism for such young people, with special kudos to those who performed entire scenes in French. In a Q&A session after the show, they told us that they had worked on their accents with the help of their French teacher. Although some of the French students in the audience were not able to follow the English text in its entirety, they later told their teachers how the other languages of performance (mime, facial expressions, choreography, music, song) enabled them to follow the show. They also appreciated the fact that the company had accepted the challenge of performing in French, mirroring their own work on Shakespeare in English. Responses were equally enthusiastic when the company performed on the following day at the Maison des Chœurs, an eighteenth-century chapel in the centre of Montpellier, for a mixed audience of high-school and university students as well as academics and a more general public. As in 2016 and 2018, the Montpellier visit enriched the company's experience of performing in a wide range of venues and for very different audiences. Touring in the UK included performances in Stratford-upon-Avon, London, and Oxford (twice).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor! Or, Faites-moi Confiance, Je Suis Médecin !, directed by Perry Mills, Edward's Boys, Montpellier, France. Photograph by Nick Browning, nickbimages.com.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Trust Me, I’m a Doctor! Or, Faites-moi Confiance, Je Suis Médecin !, directed by Perry Mills, Edward's Boys, Montpellier, France. Photograph by Nick Browning, nickbimages.com.