About the work
Half-Witted Jourdain is a three-act adaptation of Molière that Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in 1932 on commission, based on Molière's "The Bourgeois Gentleman" and expanded with characters and scenes from other Molière comedies. No theatre – including the Art Theatre and the Vakhtangov Theatre – accepted the technically demanding piece, with its rapid scene changes and theatre-within-theatre structure; it remained unperformed and unpublished during Bulgakov's lifetime.
Plot
The wealthy Parisian bourgeois Jourdain is desperate to pass as a nobleman and lets flatterers and tutors of every kind empty his purse. Bulgakov frames the action as a play within a play: Molière himself sends his comedy to the actress Béjart, weaving in allusions to "Don Juan" and "The Forced Marriage".
Cultural significance
The text was not published until 1965. Its stage premiere came only fifty-nine years after it was written: on 17 March 1991, at the Moscow Art Theatre "Gorky", directed by Tatiana Doronina – one of the latest premieres among Bulgakov's plays suppressed during his lifetime.