In 1658, having been invited to perform at court for the first time in his career, Molière paired his farce Le Docteur amoureux with Nicomède, a 1651 play by France's reigning dramatist, Pierre Corneille. The choice of Nicomède is surprising for political reasons, since the play is shot through with suspicion of royal authority: Corneille's hero is a great military leader unjustly imprisoned by the weak king he selflessly serves. The choice becomes less surprising when one considers a different set of reasons. Corneille's play is a generic oddity that marries its tragic tropes to elements of historical drama and a surprisingly comic ending. Molière's provincial troupe may have felt more at ease in such a play than in a proper neoclassical tragedy, since they lacked training in rhetorically complex stage declamation and in the codified gestures and postures preferred to convey tragic stage emotion at the time. In particular, they lacked the facility of the king's (and Corneille's) favorites, the esteemed Hôtel de Bourgogne actors, who were in the audience as guests of the monarch. No doubt anxious in their presence and in the presence of the king, Molière might have sought to mitigate the unfavorable comparison he anticipated between the talents of his troupe and those of the reigning Paris tragedians.

In the course of his career, James Macdonald has directed a vast array of plays and operas in London, New York, Vienna, and Berlin, but he is perhaps best known for the premiere productions of Sarah Kane's Blasted, Cleansed, and 4.48 Psychosis at the Royal Court Theatre, where he was an Associate Director from 1992 to 2006. His most recent work includes Peter Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other at the National Theatre and the Broadway revival of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. Macdonald met with R. Darren Gobert in London on 23 January 2006 to discuss the challenges of working with spare, difficult plays such as Kane's, Churchill's A Number, and Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies. R. Darren Gobert wishes to thank Annabel Rutherford for transcribing the conversation and, for their funding, the Faculty of Arts Committee on Research, Grants, and Scholarships at York University.