Play: The Bores

Overview
Les Fâcheux (The Bores) is a one-act comédie-ballet by Molière first performed in 1661. Written for a royal entertainment, it blends spoken comedy with musical divertissements and dance, inaugurating a fruitful collaboration between Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully. The piece satirizes the intrusive manners and affectations of contemporary society through a rapid succession of comic encounters that interrupt an evening of love and leisure.

Plot
A young lover seeks a quiet, pleasant evening with his beloved, but his attempts are continually thwarted by a procession of tiresome characters who impose themselves on him and his companion. Each arrival presents a new, absurd preoccupation or mannerism that derails conversation and amusement: pedantry, officiousness, vanity, false learning and comic pomposity parade across the stage. Rather than building a conventional plot of intrigue and resolution, the play strings together these interruptions, using each intrusion to expose a different social annoyance until the lovers finally recover their evening through a series of staged entertainments.

Characters and Episodes
The dramatis personae are primarily types rather than deep psychological portraits, designed to represent recognizable irritants of court and salon life. A boastful admirer, a meddlesome courtier, a pompous pedant and other comic figures each monopolize attention with their idiosyncratic speech or behavior. Between episodes of spoken comedy, choreographed dances and musical interludes offer relief and counterpoint, turning each interruption into an opportunity for spectacle. The contrast between the lovers' desire for privacy and the characters' relentless self-display provides the play's comic energy.

Style and Music
Les Fâcheux exemplifies Molière's skill at combining sharp verbal comedy with theatrical spectacle. The dialogue is economical and often witty, relying on rhythm and the repetition of annoying traits to amplify laughter. The comédie-ballet format integrates moments of music and dance that both interrupt the drama and comment on it, allowing choreography to mock or underscore the foibles onstage. Jean-Baptiste Lully's music and the courtly dances give the piece a polished, ceremonial air that heightens the contrast between genuine feeling and social posturing.

Themes and Legacy
Satire of social affectation lies at the heart of the work: manners, fashion, and empty rhetoric are shown to be obstacles to sincere relationships. The play probes the tension between individual desire and communal performance, suggesting that social life can become a parade of self-importance that crowds out intimacy. Les Fâcheux also helped shape French theatrical taste by demonstrating how comedy, music and dance could be woven together into a unified entertainment. Its success encouraged later collaborations between Molière and Lully and influenced the development of opéra-ballet and the French stage's emphasis on the integration of multiple arts in service of theatrical effect.