'Surely no prospect is as sweet as that of Triumph over Resistance', says Don Juan in Moliere's play - the sort of declaration that would not only make feminists bristle but give many male sensualists pause, with its cold cruelty, its substitution of power-hunger for genuine sexual appetite. Don Juan, the legendary rake, was first put into drama by a 17th century Spanish monk, and then transplanted to the Italian stage, before being dramatized by Moliere in 1665 and Mozart and Da Ponte in 1787. He was a southern Faust, the pursuer of the sensual rather than the cerebral, but perhaps as ruthlessly greedy for knowledge as his German counterpart, prepared to jeopardize his own and other people's happiness in his one-track hunt. He preceded the Romantics, who, with their relish for passion and sentiment, might have extolled his rebelliousness but criticized his lack of feeling, yet he is an ambiguous figure even in the 17th century - is he admirable or despicable? - and Moliere only enhances the ambiguity by portraying him in glutted late middle-age. 
      Neil Bartlett's production at the Lyric of his translation of Moliere's Don Juan is alive to the ambivalences of the original. This French Don Juan has played the same game of seduction incessantly, never falling in love, quickly bored, and so jaded that he needs to spice it up by seducing nuns or happily-affianced girls. Yet this very ennui drives him to courageous acts - rescuing his would-be brother-in-law from three ruffians, challenging conventions, mocking religion and hypocrisy, inviting a dead man to dinner, daring God or the Devil to show their hand. In one way he seems careless of what people think of him, in another his whole life is dedicated to showing off - even his sexual exploits are less prompted by sensuality than by desire to demonstrate his skill and strategy. How far are we meant to sympathise with him? 
      Any contemporary production of this play has to cope with the further layer of ambiguity added by subsequent changes in attitudes to women, sex, class and God. As Juan's servant, Sganarelle, continually points out, his master could never get away with his misbehaviour were he not rich and aristocratic. But maybe it seems worse to a post-Marxist audience that the Don should specialize in seducing servant-girls who are liable to become unemployed and destitute if disgraced. And on the other hand, to declaim atheism and contempt for religion is now so de rigeur that we have lost the 17th century sense of the Don's bravado when he does so. So, once you've stripped away much of the immediate sense of his courage, and had an enhanced sense of his egoism and callousness, there seems less to recommend him. In Bartlett's production, James Wilby's Juan does not even endear himself to us by his vigour, joie de vivre and sexiness. He is played, maybe deliberately, as fey, listless, almost de-sexed. It never even feels as if he desires any of the women he pursues. 
      Of course noone would want Moliere, or productions of his plays, to be didactic or dogmatic, but ultimately, there is something unsettling about feeling so unguided about what to think and feel. Whereas Shakespeare is still so fresh, so accessible, so moving, that you can apply lines and speeches to your life and loves, watching this production is in some ways like watching a Greek tragedy - you know that what you are watching has left a huge legacy in the present, you are theoretically acquainted with the gods, Fate, God or whatever forces and divinities, the political ambience, the literary antecedents and successors, the themes, the metaphors, the ironies. But you watch through a veil of puzzlement and detachment, numbly alienated. It's impossible to be frightened by the dead statue walking, or Juan's damnation, or to know whether his death is supposed to be tragic, melodramatic, faked, or Brechtianly alienating (as it felt). 
      Yet oddly, whereas Shakespeare has become dated and puzzling in some of his comic scenes, Moliere is still pungently funny and satirical, and was well served in this production by tight, sharp direction, and some excellent actors, particularly Paul Ritter in his superbly witty and intelligent portrayal of Sganarelle, and Giles Fagan and James Bellorini, who were marvelously amusing, sympathetic and convincing as manservants, aristocrats, a creditor and a beggar. The sombre, hellish red and black of the setting - a smart hotel - gave a sense of life as a dark constricted arena for servants and served to pass and re-pass. And, whatever the ambiguities, what clearly emerged from this production was certainty that we were, and still are -- including the supposedly-rebellious Don Juan - hilariously pitiful in our proneness to superstition, hypocrisy, self-deception and competitiveness.
Jane O'Grady