A theatrical adaptation of Voltaire’s masterpiece Candide, or Optimism, now running at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris through the end of the calendar year, is drawing panegyrical reviews and figures to be a smash hit with its French audience. Of course, it’s 2006, which means that the action will not take place in Bulgaria, Portugal, Surinam, or El Dorado , as Voltaire would have it, but rather exclusively in the United States. Bewigged characters in this comic operetta prance about in front of the White House and President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and rather than encounter South American natives and Westphalian soldiers, they meet up with Mormons and hippies. 

The despoliation of past masterpieces has become quite fashionable in the modern art world. Perhaps the most blatant instance of this trend was the 2003 exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, entitled “Rape of Creativity,” in which the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman unveiled eighty original prints from Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, the only value added being that they were defaced with crudely-drawn gas masks and clown faces. That same year (by no coincidence the year of the Iraq invasion), the Glyndebourne Festival featured a Peter Sellars adaptation of Mozart’s Idomeneo, with Idomeneo and his sidekick Arbace incomprehensibly replaced with George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and Ilia transformed into a headscarf-clad Muslim girl. Earlier this year, Hans Neuenfels’ Idomeneo featured the decapitated heads of Jesus Christ, Poseidon, the Buddha, and, problematically for some, Mohammed. In fact, this adaptation of Candide is not wholly original itself, and is inspired by a 1953 Leonard Bernstein production that attempted to match Voltaire's Portuguese auto-da-fe scenes to American McCarthyism (an effort no less fatuous than it was in Arthur Miller’s more celebrated The Crucible). It is more concretely based on a Vietnam-era book by Hugh Wheeler.

There are numerous faults with this particular adaptation's overall concept and execution. First and foremost, Candide was an international romp touching on the vagaries of the human condition while poking fun at numerous countries, real or thinly-disguised. By setting it solely in the United States, the work becomes an exercise in gormless anti-Americanism. Additionally, the adaptations of Candide’s illustrious set-pieces are terribly imprecise. Voltaire’s El Dorado was meant to be a meritorious world of commerce and intellectual freedom, but in the musical is presented as the ever-vapid Hollywood . An affecting scene in Voltaire’s novella involving five deposed kings, which is in many ways of a pair with Adam Smith’s famous kings and beggars passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (written in the same year, 1759), becomes Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, Chirac, and Putin (pronounced with the obvious and puerile pun “putain,” or “whore”) sitting on an oil-slick. The final number, based on the famous maxim “We must cultivate our gardens,” is set against a back-drop featuring scenes of first-world factories and third-world refugees, a lame cause-and-effect relationship which is very much the antithesis of Voltaire’s position on development and progress.

In other words, this new Candide lacks both the spirit and substance of Voltaire’s subtle original. It is essentially a new work, connected only nominally with the eighteenth-century archetype. This is hardly surprising, but it speaks to a deeper concern. Candide advocated the disposal of Leibnizian optimism, and proposed that, in the end, a more realistic and pragmatic approach is necessary (“Let’s get down to work and stop philosophizing,” the character Martin tells Candide). Yet the new Candide ’s audience, and many European elites and citizens alike, seem more content to laugh at American foibles (real and perceived) and relentlessly pursue vague transnational agendas than to get down to the serious business of confronting the myriad of existential threats we all face. As such, they would be far better served by digesting the lessons of the original Candide than by reveling in its present, altogether waspish, adaptation.