Classical comedy can seem the easiest and most inviting thing to slap onto a stage. A peruke, a bodice, a pratfall, an ogle . . . et voilà! Instant tradition. But in fact success there is almost the rarest of theatrical accomplishments. Take Molière. Eric Bentley once remarked, in reviewing a Comédie Française performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, that Molière “is fully accessible only in performance, and only in excellent performance at that.” Recent New York productions of Tartuffe and The Miser by organizations other, alas, than the Comédie Française prompt a still sterner verdict. Molière, it is regrettably clear, is accessible at all only in excellent performance.

The Miser centers on Harpagon, a man in his sixties who obsessedly blocks life in two major ways—first, by stingy housekeeping and treasure hoarding and, second, by promoting such unseasonal marriages as his own to a young woman in love with and beloved by his own son and his daughter’s to another old man (the main stimulus for Harpagon here is that the old man will take the daughter “without dowry”). Harpagon is a thoroughgoing anti-life figure, blinded by love of the inanimate to the simplest realities of animate life around him. He is a classic character in more than one sense, for The Miser is a more or less close adaptation of Plautus’s Aulularia. The three most famous comic moments in The Miser—Harpagon’s delight at the prospect of getting rid of his daughter “sans dot”;