The only French theatre which is regularly revived today in Britain is the plays of Molière and Feydeau. There was a time when the plays of Anouilh dominated the London stage; but that was a long time ago. French 19th century dramas survive only in operas. As for French classical theatre, it has never been popular. There have been the occasional successful productions of Racine, but Corneille is ignored almost completely.
The Illusion, written in 1636 when Corneille was 29, was his last comedy before he got down to his tragedies. It’s a play-within-a-play, a combination of pastoral, commedia dell’arte and reality, embracing comedy, tragic-comedy and tragedy. Anticipating Pirandello by 300 years, it is an argument for the power of theatrical imagination over reality. He would later dismiss it as a caprice, a stage monster. “It is an extravagant trifle,” he said, “which is so irregular that it is not worth considering.” At Southwark they, inevitably, do not have the financial resources for the spectacular Baroque excesses and theatrical extravagancies in scenery and costume the production really needs.
A father asks a magician to find his long lost son. The magician conjures up scenes from the boy’s life, showing him courting two women, an aristocrat and her maid, and ending up killed in a duel. The father is naturally deeply upset to see his son dead; but he is even more upset to find that he is alive and an actor and that what he had been watching was theatre and not real life. The youngsters are played by actors who have recently graduated from RADA; but their plights are never sufficiently real in the first place to involve the audience emotionally.
Seb Harcombe’s production uses a very free adaptation by Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. The high spots are two descriptions of Love, one venomous, delivered by Daniel Easton, the other lyrical, delivered by Melanie Jessop.