I think I may need to explain this post a bit better and preempt at least a few angry comments.
First, I do want to stress that, for the most part, I thought the production of Tartuffe was well done, but the play itself was execrable.
Second, I don't mean that people that enjoyed themselves were duped. What I was really getting at is that there is a powerful tendency for people who have spent a fair bit of money (and time!) on something, either a car or a house or an evening out, will generally want to feel that their money was well-spent -- and that their judgement was correct in purchasing that thing in the first place. It is essentially a form of self-reinforcement. Georg Simmel goes into this at some length in The Philosophy of Money, a profound but relatively unknown book.
Third, I don't consider it an insult to say that, for many theatre-goers, plot is fairly incidental compared to the dialogue (even I find the language in Walsh's Penelope far more interesting than the so-called plot), or the quality of the acting, or some aspect of the director's approach, or even the sets and costumes. All of these are perfectly valid things to focus on. It is just in my make-up that I am deeply driven by plot considerations, which is why I very rarely see the same play done more than once, even if it is a different production. There are exceptions of course, particularly plays that are mostly about ideas which I find stimulating. As it happens, I'll almost certainly be seeing Arcadia for a third time in November.
The last thing I want to discuss is that I seem to be implying that Molière is violating a contract with the audience when he pulls these rabbits out hats without any warning. Actually, I do feel this way. But what could this mean? It's not that I think any idea is too "out there" to be put on stage, but that a good playwright will construct a play within a particular set of rules. There is one set for comedy (where all must be set right at the end) and another for classic tragedy (it is almost inevitable that there be a way out of the unfolding mess on stage but the protagonist's fatal flaw closes this off). There are more realistic dramas where there may not even be a true villain in a piece but the point of the play is that people have legitimate interests that clash and end up hurting others (I'm sort of thinking about The Glass Menagerie or some of O'Neill's later plays). The whole second paragraph of this post from a couple of years ago goes into this at length.
One thing does bear repeating and that is, I really don't think most playwrights or actors understand that most people that do go to theatre aren't fully immersed in their world. (And this is particularly true for Broadway productions.) We are just occasional sight-seers. There is a clear tendency in essentially all the arts for artists to feel stifled and/or bored by convention and to want to try new things; this almost always ends up being pretty esoteric -- free jazz for example or a lot of conceptual art and nearly all performance art. But theatre requires an audience, and this audience is very often not "ready" or remotely interested in ditching theatrical conventions.
So one could argue (though I don't really think it was the case) that Molière knowingly violated the rules of comedy by delaying the downfall of the scoundrel Tartuffe for an unnaturally long time, but even more importantly, did not have his downfall brought about by the resourcefulness of the main characters, but rather by a deus ex machina in the form of message from the king that set things right. How many people would find this a clever ending aimed at theatre "insiders" specifically because it thumbed its nose at convention versus how many would just feel that there was something wrong with the play because it refused to follow the typical rules of comedy? It really is difficult to walk that line between playing primarily to a very small elite group within the already fairly elite group of theatre-goers and catering to the broader crowd. Certainly when I have overheard people leaving the theatre, they so rarely catch many nuances of the plays and sometimes have major misunderstandings of what actually happened in the plot. Personally, I've come to the conclusion that if you want to work in theatre, which requires and indeed demands a public in the way being a novelist does not (though clearly a novelist would like to find a public!), then one should play fair with one's audience. I suppose this really is quite a conservative view, but it is one that is grounded in wanting the audience to be respected and perhaps even more in the belief that there is a kind of artistic integrity to a play that should be maintained. (Next thing you know, I'll be resurrecting New Criticism.)
But it is even ok to put together a play within a set of rules that are postmodern, i.e. there are no rules or at least no conventional ones, but this should be established early on, and certainly by the intermission, so that people who wish to leave may do so. Certainly Jones and others pour much of their scorn on plays that suddenly shift direction and their ground rules after the intermission.
Curiously, I was somewhat involved in a play that does exactly this. David Henry Hwang set out to write a play that starts as a family comedy and devolves into tragedy. This was Family Devotions. While I did enjoy it, it does not surprise me that it wasn't viewed as a particularly successful play because it is unsettling. I might well not have been so forgiving if I hadn't read the play first. In this case, I may be too willing to interpret some of the unsettling aspects of the first half as being enough of a sign post that the play was not going to fall into a completely comic mode. But as I said, I was an insider for this production (I was actually just rotating off the board of that particular theatre company and knew all the actors) and was willing to accept the rules being deeply bent in this particular case.
At any rate, I think I have made my position on Tartuffe clear enough. From my perspective, it violates far too many precepts of the rules of comedy. Indeed, the amount of information withheld from the audience and revealed later is enormous, and that's probably the biggest cheat. It isn't even particularly original, as pious hypocrites have been in literature for ages, notably in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and in Boccaccio's The Decameron.
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