First read at Mlle Quinault’s in October 1748, and then a flop at the Théâtre Français in 1755, Marivaux’s one-act comedy recounts the efforts of the valet Merlin to stage a short entertainment for his mistress, Madame Argante, at the wedding between her daughter Angélique and the young Eraste. To do this, Merlin forms a cast out of his fellow servants: Lisette (a housemaid and Merlin’s fiancée), Blaise the gardener and Colette, Blaise’s sweetheart. Disdaining anything so vulgar as a plot, Merlin proposes a canevas, an impromptu performance popular at the Théâtre Italien in this period. The opening conceit is a simple one: the couples will be switched round, so that Merlin will woo Colette, while Blaise and Lisette weep and fume respectively.

Playing characters who themselves are acting is no easy task, but both director (David McCallam) and actors rose to the occasion. Chris Leffler, playing the theatrically-inclined valet, tackles this particular challenge with a wonderful line in over-the-top gestures: going down on one knee to Eraste, performing tadasana while inhaling deeply each time he entered into his role, raising an arm to strike a tragic pose, and sobbing when things got out of hand, all of which drew laughter from the audience. Such was his level of energy from the start that there was little difference between the valet and the valet-playing-the-lover. Colette, played by Matilda Parslow, was much less overstated: in the play, it is she who coquettishly ignores Merlin’s increasingly fraught attempts to remind everyone that they are only acting, so a relatively uniform style of presentation was appropriate, even if at times it clashed with the louder performances around her. The loudest of these was undoubtedly Robyn Kirwan’s Lisette, whose suspicion that Merlin and Colette are doing more than acting soon boils over into anger. Shuffling about the stage at high speed and firing off her lines with impatient, sharp waves of her hands, Kirwan brought a great deal of life to the show. The only issue with her part, and it is, I suspect, more a problem with the text than the actress, was that Lisette appeared the most two-dimensional of all the characters, shifting between fury and suspicion with little emotional middle-ground. One of the best lines of the play, however, occurs at just such a point of balance: the petite Kirwan, rushing up to Leffler as they ‘rehearse’ a scene of jealous lovers, pauses and asks with muted anger, “puis-je te battre?” [‘May I hit you?’].

Merlin breaks off preparations at this point, and we are introduced to the other half of the play. The antitheatrical Madame Argante (Eleanor Hodgson, also the producer) enters with an almighty stomp of her high heels, and, learning of what’s afoot, soon bans the entertainment. This, however, has some surprising consequences. Eraste’s uncle, Monsieur Amelin (Maxime Goergen), who asked Merlin to stage the play in the first place, takes offence at having it cancelled and so decides to exact revenge on Madame Argante by pretending to break off the marriage between his nephew and Angélique. This conceit, like that of Merlin’s loving Colette, will, he hopes, provide some wedding entertainment in its own right. After all, as Goergen – sporting a beard and a formidable stage presence – put it with pantomime nastiness, “je voulais rire, et je rirai.” [‘I wanted to laugh, and I will laugh’].

Amelin puts his plan into action by claiming that Eraste will now marry his friend, the forty-year-old Araminte, played by Dawn Brinkman, in a pair of very high heels. Eraste, whose timidity was fully conveyed by the soft-spoken Liz Trueman, despairs, and is only able to look forlornly out to the audience and elicit a mixture of pity and laughter with such lines as “je sais plus où j’en suis” [‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more’]. Curiously, this expression of disorientation echoes words spoken by Lisette as she struggles to accept the premises of Merlin’s impromptu, which makes for another parallel between Amelin’s scheme and the valet’s he funded. On top of this, the shuffling adopted by the enraged Lisette was mirrored by Brinkman as Araminte, who shifted from one foot to another in a mix of predatory eagerness and painful awareness of being so much older than her supposed prey. These verbal and physical echoes across the play help to tie this work together, and even hint at a peculiar egalitarianism in the work: Amelin may be paying Merlin, but both of them end up creating very similar situations amongst their peers.

Unlike Merlin, however, Amelin’s scheme soon bears fruit. Madame Argante quickly agrees to let the servants perform if it means saving her daughter’s marriage. As Merlin and his troupe perform, Madame Argante even shares in the merriment of Monsieur Amelin and the others, almost all of it at the expense of Blaise (Callum Simpson). From his first appearance to his performance in front of his betters, Simpson’s gardener maintained, beneath hair held back by a hairclip, a blankness of expression forged from incomprehension and suspicion, the look of a concerned fool or, as another character puts it, “ce ton de nigaud-là”. Occasionally veering a bit too rapidly between angry outbursts and stolid repetition of phrases like “ils font semblant de faire semblant” [‘they are pretending to pretend’], he remained – in a brief survey of other audience members – one of the favourite figures in the drama.

Despite the assurances of Madame Argante, Blaise’s confusion and the anger of Lisette soon make Merlin’s impromptu untenable as each refuses to act. Yet just as this impasse is reached a notary (Tom Stephenson) delivers a marriage contract. Pushing things to their limit, Amelin claims it is for Eraste and Araminte, but a happy ending for all but the quadragénaire and the servants is ensured when it turns out that the contract is in fact for the two young lovers.

A dance concluded the performance by restoring some harmony, each figure waltzing with their partner in character: Lisette and Merlin took their bows together (Merlin’s rather more greedy than his fiancée’s), as did Colette and Blaise (the latter losing his hat in the process). Overall, the production was one of great energy, and made for an enjoyable evening as we were taken down laughing into the depths of Marivaux’s mise en abîme.

Les Acteurs de bonne foi was performed in French with Ionesco’s Le maître at the Drama Studio, Glossop Road, Sheffield, on Wednesday 19th, Thursday 20th and Friday 21st February, and at Newnham College, Cambridge on 27th February 2014.