The Hypochondriac_premiere - Portal do Município de Vila Nova de Famalicão - Portugal

Casa das Artes | Grand Auditorium - 21h30

Admission: 4 euros. Students, Cultural Quadrilateral Card and Seniors (aged 65 and over): 2 euros | Rating: M/12 | Running time: 120 min | Group: ACE Famalicão

‘Just as in religion, in medicine there are the <directors of conscience> and the devout who blindly give themselves into the hands of individuals who instil in them and exploit what is perhaps the most human of weaknesses: the fear of death,’ says Alexandra Moreira da Silva in her Foreword. The play tells the story of Argão, an old hypochondriac, rich and miserly man who, with his mania for illness, wants to marry his daughter, Angélica, off to a doctor, Tomás Diaforético, just to save money on consultations and have quick access to all the prescriptions he needs. Argão is an obsessive, pathetic character who has no feelings for anyone, grotesque in his self-centredness and who demands everyone's attention without giving anything in return. Jean-Luc Lagarce's comment about the character is brilliant: ‘A body that devours everything, that prevents others from living, that swallows them up, devours and drowns them, a selfish, monstrous body that denies the existence of other bodies, that speaks only of itself’. Argão is blindly in love with his second wife, Belina, who in turn tries to plot a coup, in collusion with Mr Boafé, to take his fortune and send his daughter to a convent. The maid, Tonieta, joins forces with the hypochondriac's brother, Beraldo, in an attempt to unmask the dishonest wife and, at the same time, help her desperate daughter Angélique stay with Cleanto, the noble boy she is truly in love with. When Molière wrote ‘The Hypochondriac’ ("Le malade imaginaire") he knew he was seriously ill. He played Argão (a fake patient with incredible vitality) and disguised the pain of his convulsions with laughable gasps when he collapsed on the fourth day of the performance - it was his own illness and death that the author played with and made us laugh at.