DER GEIZIGE

“Alas! My poor money! My poor money! My dearest friend, they have bereaved me of thee; […] All is ended for me, and I have nothing more to do in the world! Without thee it is impossible for me to live.”

Harpagon, a father and newly wealthy Parisian bourgeois, is as devastated by the theft of his money box as others are by the loss of a loved one. With his boundless greed, he destroys the future of his two children, both young and in love. For Harpagon, marriage is nothing more than a financial deal. This attitude gradually unravels the family bond and soon leads his children to resist him with all manner of cunning. Gradually, not only the children’s lovers become caught up in the story, but also other characters such as the resourceful matchmaker, the wronged servant, and the deceitful money broker. A game unfolds around the formula money versus love, in the course of which Harpagon’s insatiable greed turns the old man, despite all the comedy, into a disturbing demon.

The plays of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who as an actor and writer took the name Molière, are incisive observations of society. His comedy DER GEIZIGE, first performed in 1668 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris, is rooted in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, opposing human feeling to the drive for profit. Thus the spectre of capital – well before Marx’s “Manifesto” – already haunts Molière’s renowned play. In Rafael Sanchez and Mike Müller’s adaptation of the classic for the Schauspielhaus Zürich, it becomes clear that this spectre has grown even more threatening in our present than it was in Molière’s own time.