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Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673) was a French playwright and actor who revolutionized comedy through sharp social satire and an unflinching exploration of human folly. Molière’s genius lies in his ability to expose the ridiculous through language, farce, and the psychology of desire—specifically, the universal hunger to be something other than what we are. His comedy is both laugh-out-loud funny and intellectually penetrating, operating simultaneously as entertainment and social critique.
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) remains one of his most beloved works, performed continuously for over 350 years. The play was first performed as an “opera-ballet” (accompanied with Lully’s music) so the text keeps some musical and singing instructions. The play follows Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy bourgeois obsessed with becoming a gentleman through the acquisition of refinement and status. He hires masters to teach him music, dancing, fencing, and philosophy, surrounding himself with charlatans and yes-men who exploit his vanity. Yet beneath the farce lies a serious meditation on social mobility, the construction of identity, and the gap between appearance and reality. The play remains astonishingly contemporary: it reveals how people perform themselves into being, and how easily that performance can become absurd.
Yasmina Reza (born 1959) is a contemporary French-Hungarian playwright and novelist known for her sharp, rapid-fire dialogue and her unsentimental exploration of middle-class anxieties. Her play Art won the Molière Prize and was translated into dozens of languages. Le Dieu du Carnage (2006) follows four parents meeting to discuss an incident involving their children. What begins as a civilized conversation quickly descends into insult, accusation, and barely-suppressed violence. Her dialogue is staccato, witty, and merciless—she dissects how quickly civility collapses when ego is threatened. One of my personal favorite plays!
Together, these two plays create a conversation across 336 years about social performance, class anxiety, and human folly. Molière satirizes the hunger to rise in social status; Reza satirizes the fragility of self-stability. Both playwrights use comedy as a weapon to expose the gap between who we pretend to be and who we actually are. This four-week theatre course marks your first encounter with drama at The French Book Club—an opportunity to experience literature as performance, language as music, and comedy as a form of philosophical truth-telling.
