France celebrates 400 years of Molière — but is he as good as Shakespeare?

When the French refer to their native tongue, they often call it the "language of Molière” and as their most famous comic playwright turns 400, he remains as central to Gallic culture as Shakespeare in the English-speaking world.

This weekend, France launched a year of events to mark the anniversary, including new statues, an official Moliere stamp, a costume exhibition, and of course, fresh stagings of his biting comedies such as The Imaginary Invalid and The Miser.

To kick celebrations off, the famous Comédie-Française in Paris, the oldest active theatre company in the world, on Saturday held a special performance of the originally banned 1664 Tartuffe, broadcast live in cinemas in seven countries.

The 17th-century wordsmith has even been thrust to the centre of France's presidential election campaign amid claims that the anniversary had been overlooked by President Emmanuel Macron, who is reportedly able to recite entire scenes of Molière's works.

Writing in Le Figaro this week, centre-right Republicans candidate Valérie Pécresse said Mr Macron had turned his back on the writer, failing to mark the "indelible imprint [he] left on universal culture".

Yet in the UK, Molière has sometimes been derided as not a patch on the Bard, notably due to the difficulty in translating plays written in alexandrines, or rhyming couplets.

Indeed, in the 1980s, one Sunday Times critic even feared that Molière posed an obstacle to a united Europe: "How can you trade freely with a nation whose best comedy does not travel?,” he asked.

"It used to be a box office manager's nightmare to have a Molière production. You often had more people on stage than in the theatre," Noel Peacock of the University of Glasgow, an expert on Moliere translations, told AFP.

However, there has been a "complete turnaround” in recent years and his biting comedies are back with a vengeance, he said.

These include three major versions of Tartuffe in London alone between 2016 and 2019. His plays have attracted a host of celebrities: Keira Knightly played in "The Misanthrope" in 2009 and David Tennant (of Doctor Who fame) in "Don Juan" in 2017.

The National Theatre’s hit 2019 production of Tartuffe was adapted and written by John Donnelly.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Mr Donnelly said Molière’s plays had withstood the test of time because “the archetypes ring true”.

Perhaps Molière’s best-known play, Tartuffe is about a fraud of the same name who disguises himself as a priest to convince a naive, wealthy aristocrat into handing him his fortune and daughter's hand in marriage, even as he chases after his wife.

“In Tartuffe, the idea of a holy a fool, a stranger who burrows into your household, the enemy from within, has a resonance today,” he said, as does the idea of “inviting a figure into our homes to sort out the things we don’t want to do ourselves and then blaming them for it afterward”.

Take Brexit. “For liberal thinking, it can be quite convenient to blame everything on a ‘horrible Right-wingers’ like (Nigel) Farage who did this to us rather than the idea that we have been living in a liberal society for a while but created the conditions for this to happen,” he said. “So how do we look at ourselves in that context?”

Mr Peacock credited fresh translations less concerned about linguistic accuracy than capturing Moliere's spirit with helping to bring out the universal truths in his work.

As for who was better, Shakespeare or Molière, whose real name was Jean-Baptise Poquelin, Mr Donnelly said it was a “fun pub argument”.

“It’s like trying to work out whether Bjorn Borg is better than Roger Federer, or, a slightly better analogy, whether Borg is better than Pele because you just can’t compare them exactly - both are really good and we should be happy about that.”

However, French playwright and Avignon theatre festival director Olivier Py said Shakespeare was in a league of his own.

“There is no author in the history of humanity who is comparable in range with Shakespeare,” he told France Culture. But trying to translate him into French was” not difficult, it’s impossible”.

“The English can perform King Lear in two and half hours whereas it takes us four. French slows everything down,” he said.