| Summary: | To stage a Molière play in Portugal nowadays poses a metatheatrical challenge as the stage itself becomes a space for the utopian recreation of voices, bodies and objects which once made sense in Versailles. D. João, by Ricardo Pais (2006) becomes a tragi-comic spectacle of seventeenth-century erudite libertinism, while Miguel Loureiro’s mise-en-scène of L’Impromptu de Versailles (2016) delves into the ontological relations between theatrical illusion and the neobaroque challenges of the performance. Starting from Meschonnic’s notions of “historical displacement of discourses” and “the invention of orality that transforms orality” which he developed in connexion with the poetics of (re)writing, this paper addresses the meaning of the « decentering » of the voices in the two contemporary renderings of Molière’s plays, showing that the playwright’s modernity is assured by multiple modern-day rereadings of the meta-dramatic structure of these plays.
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