Directed by: Mateja Koležnik
Molière's comedy premiered at the Théâtre du Palais in 1668. 355 years later, Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik is staging the still highly topical material in the banking city of Frankfurt. It is about nothing less than avarice.
"The Miser", as we know the 5-act comedy by Molière, is largely based on the so-called comedy of the pot of gold by the Roman poet Plautus. Little is known about Plautus, except that he died in 184 BC. He is said to have written his comedies as a so-called mill slave, because he actually hired himself out to a miller as a slave after he had lost all the money he had earned on stage through speculation. Sounds modern! Plautus was supposedly an actor and also a comedian. He was not a desk poet, but wrote from theater practice, inspired by the stage. Molière - actually Jean-Baptiste Poquelin - also became an author as an actor. In 1668, in the last years of his long career, he wrote "L'Avare" (The Miser) as a prose comedy in which he caricatures the type of bourgeois who has become rich but has remained stingy, suffocating his more fun-loving and consumerist children with his avarice. While Molière writes a ludicrously intricate comedy on the subject of avarice, Koležnik will seek and find the human transgression in it.
