The play, misleadingly, begins in the original Renaissance setting of Voltaire's story. Candide has found himself in the lavish home of a wealthy, older lascivious Countess (Ishia Bennison). In order to wake him from his depressed stupor (we begin, oddly, after many of the story's actual sad events have taken place), the Countess plans to put on a play of Candide's life and journey (using details surreptitiously gleaned from his journal). This meta-theatrical twist is perhaps the first signal that the RSC's Candide is not going to be your standard, run-of-the-mill performance - as the play develops classic is insistently replaced with 'original' and diverting.
The play within a play ensues - beginning with the beginning of Voltaire's story. Candide is the ward of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh, (Baron of Westphalia, a region in Germany), and receives instruction from Dr. Pangloss, a professor of 'metaphysic-theologo-cosmonigology' and proponent of the 'optimism' theory, which teaches that we live in the 'best of all possible worlds': in essence, it is a deterministic theory which states that 'things cannot be other than what they are'.* On seeing Pangloss 'real' Candide (Matthew Needham) rushes to embrace him. One would be quick to point out - as the actor Pangloss is - that he is a mere representation of Pangloss, not the 'real thing'. I like the way that 'real' Candide can't seem to grasp the idea of a play, it highlights his impenetrable naiveté, and unshakeable - if ridiculous - optimism: although he is watching a play of his own life, and knows what must and will occur next, he still preserves a futile hope that he can alter the past. This bleeding of 'real' life (play life) into theatre (the play within the play) continues with the arrival of Cunegonde, Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh's beautiful daughter, and Candide's life-long love. Candide tries to embrace the actress Cunegonde - seemingly unaware that she is an actress, a mere representation of his 'love' - desperately and vainly attempting to pluck nourishment from art to feed his bleak reality.
Back to the play, and Candide happily finds himself engaged in a rather dirty kiss with Cunegonde; unfortunately, Baron and Baroness Thunder-ten-Tronckh are also engaged in watching this kiss, and he is quickly given the boot. I didn't expect to see a woman simulate orgasm on stage (the kiss is on the mouth in Voltaire), and it made for uncomfortable, but nonetheless humorous viewing - the old women opposite me were in stitches! As Candide is evicted, the humorous vein continues with a reprise of Pangloss' reccuring interlude 'this is the best of all possible worlds'. At this stage in the play, when the damage is still relatively jejune and light (although Candide is banished, he still heartily vows to be reunited with his love) the song is free from ironic inflection. The song catches its first darker, more cynical notes when Candide is tricked into joining the Bulgar army. Two officers emerge on stage, and playing 'good cop', 'bad cop' they effectively jostle Candide into an alliance he was helpless to resist. Inexperienced and incompetent, he is pushed into war and kills a kindly, innocent man. The chants of the song by both sides 'this is the best of all possible worlds' respectively (they both seem to think they have won, as far as I can tell) is drenched in irony, given the level of bloodshed and fatality such a war would incur. As for Candide's own song? Is it the best of all worlds when you must kill a man for a war you truly do not know why is being fought. In the book Candide does not fight, but decamps and is captured and tortured. However, I like this deviation; Ravenhill makes us question the validity of blind optimism from the outset, and links it to wider issues - such as war and power - that are extremely relevant (and very close to the bone) in contemporary society.
Candide is soon met by Jaques (in Voltaire, James), a wealthy Anabaptist who takes Candide under his wing. Now wealthy, Candide gives some florins to a poor beggar as he passes through the town square: said beggar turns out to be Pangloss himself. Pangloss informs Candide that the palace in Westphalia has been destroyed and Cunégonde raped and disembowelled by soldiers. We also discover that Panquette, a maid from the palace in Westphalia, gave Pangloss the syphilis that has reduced him to his sick, beggarly state. Pangloss still looks upon everything - the death, the disease - of course, as the 'best possible of worlds', and tries to convince Candide of the same: at this point, however, we become doubtful. Candide gets Jaques to pay for Pangloss to be cured, and he loses 'only' an eye and an ear (the best possible of worlds). The trio subsequently embark for Lisbon. Aboard the boat, Jaques and Panlgoss argue over philosophy. Jaques proposes that 'men [...] must have somewhat altered the course of nature; for though they were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves' destroying each other, becoming bankrupt etc. Pangloss retorts with the utilitarian argument that 'private misfortunes contribute to a general good', and their abstract argument soon descends into a hilarious physical fight - Pangloss chucking Jaques from the boat as a storm ensues, affirming all the while that this is 'the best of all possible worlds', and that Lisbon was made for Jacques to die.
This comic scene is (with extreme bathos) immediately contrasted with a sombre one. Lisbon has been hit by an earthquake, tsunami and ensuing fire that has killed tens of thousands of people. The earthquake in Lisbon on All Saint's Day 1755 was one of the main inspirations for Voltaire's text. It (literally) shook the very foundations of contemporary optimistic theory. How can this be the best of all possible worlds, when devastating, horrific natural disasters such as this occur on a near-daily basis? Voltaire uses his narrative to massage this paradox, challenging Leibniz' theodicy of God's benevolence. Upon re-living the trauma of the earthquake (presented before him in play form) 'real' Candide loses it, puncturing the play-within-a-plays sing-song affirmation of optimism and insisting that the world is black, terrible, and - above all - negative.
From an insistence on metaphorical blackness we are plunged into actual blackness, as the Renaissance setting is rolled away and replaced with a 'modern-day', shiny party scene. Now things get really weird. All the original Voltarian characters - Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss - are replaced by Sophie, Sarah, Emma et al, a dysfunctional, insipid cockney family celebrating their daughter (Sophie's) eighteenth birthday. The birthday girl remains menacingly silent, while members of her family try to speak for her, her drunk mother (Sarah) berating her 'weird' mysteriousness, and her 'optimistic' step-mother Emma affirming the beneficence of the cosmos and their plan for Sophie's life. Sophie does eventually talk, whipping out a gun and declaring her intention to kill all her family. Her reasons for doing so are (to me anyway) very unclear - something to do with people not treating the earth with enough respect, of being ignorant of their own ignorance, of expecting a lot from life, of wanting to make life better with every generation. Anyway, I didn't quite 'get' this bit. Honestly, if it was meant to link to anything we'd seen so far, that link was tenuous to say the least. I suppose Sophie's negativity is meant to be an antidote to Panglossian optimism - her insistence that everything is not 'all right' a counter to his affirmation that this is 'the best of worlds'. I'm not too sure, but I do know I wasn't a particular fan of this scene, or of Sophie (Sarah Ridgeway's), shouty, brash, amateurish manner. One thing leads to another, and despite their pleas, Sophie shoots every member of her family - including herself (her plan is apparently to depopulate the world) - leaving her mother as the only survivor.
Now it's some months after the event, and Sarah is visiting a screenwriter (she has already written a book), with plans to make a film of her story. She is accompanied by I think the term was 'narrative guider' (or something to that effect), and they begin with the intention of focusing the film on the aftermath of the disaster - the positive, cathartic steps Sarah has taken towards acceptance and recovery. This is, of course, the optimistic view. However, Sarah (influenced by the boss-man and screenwriter) soon begins to realise - like Candide before her, at the destroyed Lisbon port - that you can't magically make everything positive: the horror of the trauma always remains.
Segway back to Candide, and some of the original Voltaire re-emerges (this chopping and changing really was exhausting). We meet Candide in the city of El Dorado, an isolated, rural utopia, where people love freely (as we are all 'each other' they affirm), have ample time for work and play and make all decisions in a democratic manner. Bingo, Candide thinks - he's hit the jackpot. Yet, holes in their lifestyle's quickly begin to emerge: Candide cannot believe that they do not mourn a dead man - we're all the same they insist, he lives in us - and eschew precious metals as worthless rubble. Candide decides to leave El Dorado. As it turns out, a world without selfish individualism, without grief, without greed - however manmade and evil those traits may be - is quite boring. It is here that we see Voltaire's second emphatic rejection of the optimistic theory (the first being Candide's horror at the earthquake): reality, he affirms, is beleaguered by both good and bad. A life of only good, a life lived by Leibniz' optimistic theodicy, is somehow unreal - as the RSC reflects in the day-glo colours and hazy smoke of the trippy El Dorado set - and ultimately unpleasant. This scene is filled with the laugh-out-loud comedy that I remembered experiencing originally reading Voltaire, as Candide straps himself to a sheep laden with balloons - pockets filled with gold - and willingly, nay ecstatically returns to a world of avarice and despair: optimism has dramatically failed.
While in this scene the rejection of optimism is a good thing, in the next it is not. Here we see Sarah send Hannah (the narrative shaper) away, claiming she does not need her - literally banishing all optimism from her story. Sarah and the writer go and create a new script that is dramatically inflated and completely devoid of any positive slant, featuring all the possible suffering in the world, the rapes and ravishing and disembowl-ments and betrayals of the Candide tale. Sarah argues that she and Candide are kindred spirits, and only suffering can answer suffering. Although I didn't particularly like the acting or the actress (Katy Stephens just doesn't do it for me - I don't know why!), I see what Ravenhill was attempting to communicate; although suffering is a natural part of life, if negativity is made supreme, it is as dangerous as a purely optimistic existence. Suffering engenders suffering, but to wallow and thrill in it - as Sarah now seems to do - is anti-cathartic, unnatural, inhuman. As with all things, there needs must be balance.
The next scene jumps forward once more, to the futuristic, sterile 'Pangloss Institute' where Sarah (her film created) is on an exhibition tour displaying artefacts from Candide's life. An info-graphic informs us that Pangloss (must be around 400 years old now - all realism has gone out of the window, absurd!) has manufactured a drug to make all humans optimistic (particularly disturbing in light of the NHS' current goto method for curing depression), imposing a worldwide, forced compliance to his theory - Pangloss is the bad guy, what?! Anyway, Sarah demands conference with Candide (his body is preserved and he comes back to life - I told you it was weird), and informs him of Pangloss' plan. She is interrupted, however by a surprise guest (yep, gets even weirder), Cunegonde (Susan Engel). Cunégonde is not the stunning, buxom beauty she once was, but a time-ravaged, 300 year old woman, trailing a shabby dress behind her. Cunegonde begs Candide to fufill his promise and kiss her - battered as she is - successively listing the multiple horrors she has suffered and endured, all in the hope that Candide will 'one day' kiss her. Engel is a commanding, passionate and talented actress, and although she is on stage for a mere five minutes, she steals the show. Over 300 years Cunegonde has preserved the optimistic fervour all characters in the play so far have lost, and the accreting anger and frustration in her cries for a kiss evidence the desperation of a theory worn thin by consistent abuse. I like this reversal at the end. In Voltaire's story Candide is the protagonist, and Cunegonde's personal journey is overlooked. Ravenhill has shown in Candide and Sarah that optimism can falter, but here he presents a character who sticks with it - for better or worse. Yet she is not happy, Cunegonde is distinctly unhappy. She ultimately achieves her wish (very disturbing to see a 20-ish-year-old 'snogging' a 70-plus-year-old on stage, but there you go), yet it is tinged with ambivalence. Was it worth it? Did the years of optimism help? What was the alternative, to lay down and die? Everyone has to believe in something, after all. Technically, the play doesn't end on this moment - Sarah returns to stage and slits her wrists, but this is just so pathetic and gratuitous, and such an obvious attempt to draw the several threads of the plot together that I just can't tolerate it - but it was certainly the moment I find myself dwelling on.
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| Sarah Engel as Cunegonde |
Overall, I think Ravenhill has done well enough in his attempt to diversify an old tale. But my question is, did we need the modern references in order to 'get' the message? Is that not a link the theatre audience could have made on their own. We know some people live in luxury while others starve, we know that people use technology as a distraction from everyday life, and we also know that 'happiness' is, more often than not, unattainable. Personally, I don't feel like the blind amoeba Sophie (and vicariously Ravenhill) seems to tell me I am, wandering around cherishing a vain notion of idealistic living just around the corner, and selectively turning a blind eye to the world's suffering. I liked Candide, but it insistently felt like it was trying to tell me something about myself, or about society, that I already know: Ravenhill was preaching to the choir. The RSC's Candide could have done with being a smidgen less didactic, a lot less faux-modernistic, and a heap more faithful to the text.
*** Three stars.
* All direct quotations from John Butt's 1947 translation of the original, published by Penguin Classics 1982.
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