This One's Optimistic

When Pangloss, Voltaire’s clown philosopher of Optimism, recounts the genealogy of the STD that has ravaged his features, he traces the infection back to a Jesuit. Leaving aside Voltaire’s personal feud with the Society of Jesus, this family tree of syphilis parallels the progress of the optimism meme as its idiocy rages through society, church and state, leaving no quarter undisturbed with the refrain “the best of all possible worlds”. Like the novel Candide, the play Optimism castigates the pollyanna mentality that insists that the world is good in the face of perpetual evidence to the contrary. By dressing the performance in the rags of commedia del’arte, and showering the audience with a pantomime tricks and stutters, director Michael Kantor proposes a convincing argument for the absurdity of both life and the human response to suffering.

Candide, played by Frank Woodley, is a personable observer, addressing the audience in stumbling, humorous monologues that comment on the action and serve as stand-up comedy. Pangloss, who floats in and out of his life, is exposed as a moral idiot, a joke: his various torments are explained away by specious reference to a greater good that is never revealed. All of the characters are raped, tortured, killed and kill. They reject happiness when they find it, become jaded by their pleasure and even Candide’s noble love for Cunegonde – ‘nature’s masterpiece’ – leads him to an unhappy reunion. While Voltaire was reacting to the enlightenment’s inability to cope philosophically with suffering and exposing the cruel social system that allowed some luxury at the expense of others, Tom Wright’s episodic script suggests that the same problems exist in our post-modern ennui.

The message is clear: suffering exists, and simply explaining it away does not excuse it. The characters are put through degradation and pain, confront the harsh reality of capitalism, and desperately search for answers. They never manage to resolve the horror, and are confronted by the choice between continued suffering and perpetual boredom. The final conclusion – happiness is merely to tend one’s garden – is a quietist abdication, an attempt to withdraw from the brutality of existence and deny all ambition, all aspiration.

This pessimism is hardly tempered by the cheery pop songs and fast action: even Candide’s Frankie Howerd style meditations offer hollow laughter. The comedy only serves to highlight the horror: life is merely a farce wherein the people see themselves as tragic heroes.