ABSTRACT
Molière’s L’Avare and Roger Planchon’s 1986 production of that comedy play on money’s threat to aesthetic and social limits. Drawing parallel boundaries between modes of economic behavior, between social classes, and between the world of the play and that of the spectators, Molière’s text depicts the theatre as a domain in which the monetary interests which afflict prosaic, daily life cannot triumph. In so doing he makes a claim for theatre’s political usefulness but also points to the theatrical, and potentially false, nature of the nobility. In accentuating the spectacular side of Molière’s text, Planchon transposes the problem of class boundaries in ways that undermine distinctions between art for an elite and art for the masses. Both productions exploit the audience’s wish to belief in theatre’s superiority to monetary influence. Both question the cultural role of the stage and debunk facile denunciations of commercialism.
