Les Misérables is about the suffering of the powerful, not the poor
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Version 0 of 1. To dispense with the necessary review, Cameron Mackintosh’s rebooted Les Misérables, the love-it-or-hate-it musical theatre phenomenon and “poor porn” spectacular, is absolutely amazing. It’s both grand and accessible, and while it appears to take its cues from the recent Les Mis film as far as costuming and tone are concerned, this reworked production (playing everywhere but London) actually predates the Hollywood version – and the show doesn’t suffer for it. The sets are lavish, the use of special effects to give depth to the Sydney stage is both impressive and understated, and I got to sit three seats down from Monica Trapaga, who used to be on Play School. The big hits – I Dreamed a Dream, Do You Hear the People Sing? and the rest – are wonderfully done and there’s no Russell Crowe. Related: Musicals we love: Les Misérables In short, it’s a production anyone could be moved by: a seasoned hater, an obsessive Les Mis nerd like your correspondent here, those people who somehow managed to avoid this three decades-old adaptation of a 150-year-old novel, or Bronwyn Bishop, the Liberal party’s very own disciplinarian. Yes, that’s right. On Thursday night, the Speaker of the federal parliament was getting stuck into a show about a revolutionary uprising in Paris in 1832 and, as far as I could tell when I spotted her at intermission, she was absolutely loving it. But seeing her meant I was dogged by a question all night: what might she be enjoying in Victor Hugo’s story of mercy, self-sacrifice and fraternal revolutionary love? To venture a guess, I’d say Bishop enjoys it for the same reason I do: Les Mis is really about the suffering of those in power and not, in the first instance, about redemption or love or the proletariat or the merits of state-supplied childcare or any of the other things people say it is about. For the Les Mis cleanskins, here’s a heavily spoilerish synopsis: Jean Valjean is a convict who completes a long and cruel penal term for stealing a loaf of bread. Shunned and rejected after his release because of his prisoner’s brand, he is given refuge in a church and, making off with the silver, is arrested once more as a thief. A real bishop (not Bronwyn) pardons him, and, giving him two silver candlesticks in addition to the silverware he’s already pinched, buys his soul for God. Valjean goes into hiding and uses the silver to become a reformed man, rising to become the mayor of a town, where he also runs a factory as an enlightened master. Although Valjean’s moral, political and financial reform place him in a position of virtue, he continues to be hunted by the implacable Inspector Javert. The policeman’s unflinching commitment to the law leads him to pursue Valjean across the decades and through the maelstrom of the Paris Uprising of 1832, in which a student rebellion was brutally (it really happened) put down by the French monarchy’s national guardsmen. In the meantime, Valjean adopts Cosette, the daughter of Fantine, a dying woman. She grows up and gets into a love triangle with a young student revolutionary, Marius, and his street-smart friend Eponine, the daughter of two crooked innkeepers. The revolutionaries all get shot, a kid gets shot too, Eponine gets shot, Marius gets shot (but survives). Valjean refuses to shoot Javert; Javert almost shoots Valjean in the sewers (but doesn’t) and in the end there’s a wedding. Nobody gets shot at the wedding, but Valjean runs away and dies in the grace of God and it was then, customarily, that I burst out in tears. Why does Javert pursue Valjean after the convict convincingly demonstrates he is a reformed man? The only reason all this drama happens isn’t because Valjean wants it; it’s because Javert pursues Valjean for decades with utter zeal, even after the convict convincingly demonstrates he is a reformed man. Why does he bother? Does he enjoy it? And why, in the musical’s tragic conclusion, does he commit suicide after he finds himself unable to execute Valjean? These are the most important questions any production of Les Mis has to grapple with: for the sake of Bronwyn’s and my enjoyment, and for the moral drama in the production to ripen. And although Hayden Tee’s sneering, stalking inspector was one of the show’s two standout performances (the other was Kerrie Anne Greenland’s debut as Eponine), he played the inspector as cruel, rather than dutiful. As a result, the play’s moral landscape was flattened. Let me explain. The whole musical, to me, hinges on the stress Javert places on those famous lines in his soliloquy, Stars: He knows his way in the darkMine is the way of the LordThose who follow the path of the righteous Shall have their rewardAnd if they fall as Lucifer fell? The flames, the sword! In this passage, is Javert saying to the audience that because he occupies a position of authority, his cause is already justified by God (an implicit divine endorsement of his cruelty)? Tee’s Javert, kneeling in cynical prayer on the stage of Sydney’s Capitol theatre, seems to suggests this. A more subtle interpretation turns the inspector’s dictum into self-talk: “I know that as long as I follow my duty to God’s law I shall be rewarded; if I falter or fall, then I too will suffer the sword I would apply righteously to Valjean in the knowledge that I am just.” For all the criticism his singing attracted, Russell Crowe’s performance in the recent Les Mis film captured this much more clearly – his Javert never seemed to take malicious pleasure in his duty, and the film was morally deeper as a result. The Sydney portrayal, however, makes the interplay between Javert and Valjean into a struggle of wills – of good versus evil – rather than the joint suffering of two complex, interdependent men: Javert, whose commitment to the law as the source of morality means he must remain indifferent to suffering, causing him to self-destruct from his own contradictions; and Valjean, who suffers under the weight of his own redemption, given to him as a gift he could never repay. To love in the face of the cold indifference of duty is harder than to love in the face of cruelty There is also a kind of power in the characters’ suffering: Valjean’s is found in heaven, and in his ability to emancipate others through self-sacrifice, Javert’s is in his mission, which brought him out of the jail in which he was born. Ultimately, Javert’s is shown to be the weaker force: the strictures of the law are ultimately powerless before mercy. But reducing Javert to mere evilrobs Valjean of part of his victory and Javert of his tragedy. To love in the face of the cold indifference of duty is harder than to love in the face of cruelty; and for Javert to see his entire moral system be undermined by that love is a far more tragic ending than to see a merely evil man defeated. These are questions that Bronwyn and I will be mulling over for some time. But I do wonder: which way does the Speaker like her Javert to be played? • Les Misérables is at the Capitol theatre, Sydney |