In the first few months of 2020, we saw the Australian bush ablaze, a plague of locusts in East Africa, Trump almost going to war with Iran, even before Coronavirus and its horrendous fallout became part of our collective consciousness. This feeling of accumulating horror will be sadly familiar to many of us given the past year. The rapid succession of these scenes produced a whistle-stop tour of human suffering, all taking place beneath the proscenium arch which proudly heralded ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds ’ an utterly ironic juxtaposition. In Meunier’s production, the ensemble, dressed in absurd costumes, acted with greatly exaggerated movements that bordered on clowning the Baron’s flogging of Candide reminded me somewhat of the Monty Python ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch. Yet the depiction of these brutalities is acutely and deliberately funny. And so, Voltaire’s characters are subjected to all sorts of atrocities, from syphilis to slavery to cannibalism and everything in between. It seemed that philosophers like Leibniz, who argued that by necessity everything works out for the best, were mocking all this pain and misery. Catastrophes such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War (1756-63) proved to Voltaire that evil and suffering existed in the world, often without rhyme nor reason. Much of Candide is aimed at satirising the philosophy of Optimism. Director of the TNN production Arnaud Meunier claimed Voltaire’s work “would appeal to everyone, not just the intellectual elite.” I would absolutely agree with this assessment – more than ever in light of the pure chaos of the past year. True to the original text, this production chronicled the numerous misfortunes that befall Candide following his banishment and contribute to his disillusionment from the philosophy of blind Optimism instilled in him by his former tutor. The eponymous Candide is the illegitimate nephew of the Baron de Thunder-ten-Tronkh (many of the names in the text have been ridiculously exaggerated in this way) who falls in love with the Baron’s daughter, Cunégonde, and is consequently banished from the Thunder-ten-Tronkh castle. That production was an adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide, a staple of French literature and of philosophical writing. Little did I know as I took my seat at the Théâtre National de Nice, where I was doing my year abroad, just how much the production I was seeing would encapsulate all that was to come. As I’m writing this, it has been exactly a year since I last went to the theatre – which, for a lover of drama like myself, is still a bitter pill to swallow.

Candide and optimism