THE staging by St. Mary’s School of Victor Hugo’s obra maestra, the Les Miserables last May 20 and 21 at the Rodelsa Hall of Liceo de Cagayan University was very laudable as it was most relevant.
The play directed by Roland Rivera from the non-musical adaptation by Tim Kelly was powerful and magnificent. Something we can be mightily proud of. The young talents who gave life to the work of the great romantic Victor Hugo were splendid.
The play opened with a very common and powerful manifestation of injustice: Jean Valjean, one of the central characters struggling to integrate into society after spending 19 years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family.
Set during the French Revolution when the monarchy was falling and the emergence of the republican state; and when the class contradiction between the poor, toiling masses, and the aristocrats became so defined and sharp.
The lifestyle of the wretched parodied by the Thenandiers. Perhaps, many of us can relate – Filipinos making fun of their wretchedness and tragedies. Fantine, ambitious, ended up a single mother who eventually left her child in the care of the Thenandiers. A Paraluman in the epic song of the Eraserheads.
Marius and the young men and women leading the barricade portrayed the awakening of the aristocrats of the class contradictions that resulted in the exploitation of the toiling masses. The class transformation of some aristocrats and the awakening of the petit bourgeoisie. Marius managed to survive the carnage at the barricade, but his comrades did not. His salvation by Val Jean carrying his limp body was a poignant scene.
The contradiction in the lives of Cosette and Eponine was perhaps the apex of the play’s drama. Cosette eventually ends up with Marius, who both get the blessings of Valjean, who ironically got his renewal on his deathbed. Eponine on the other hand brought down his love for Marius, her own idealism, and her despair at the barricade.
Watching Les Miserables is like watching a real-life, real-time social commentary. The stories, conflicts, the struggles, the drama were so relatable.
The only difference was that the concept of the republic was the silver lining in the historical time when Hugo wrote Les Miserable (French Revolution in the 1830s). Now, the concept of the republic is being challenged. Free elections, freedom of speech, rights to life, and property, and off-springs of republicanism – which is about self-rule and the liberties of a state – are now seriously challenged.
Director Rivera could not say it more succinctly: The message of Les Miserables is timeless. “The message of Les Miserables speaks of society as a whole.
Nothing has really changed… we face the same passions, the same conflicts, the same struggles between the ones in power and the ones who are powerless.”
St. Mary’s School staged the Les Miserables with the backdrop of the real community where young people are in despair – a rise of suicides among the youth, and families struggling with high prices of commodities due to high inflation. There is also widespread contempt for those in power. And yet when people are asked to choose their leaders, they choose the same people they so contemptuously call as kawatan, kurakot, bakakon.
I am just happy, St. Mary’s School proved that our academic institutions are not about to concede the role of arts and literature to crass commercialism and TikTok.
I hope the play would help the youth contextualize social problems and take on the challenges to work for change in our society. For that hopelessness and despair to be transformed into righteous anger, which German philosopher Ernst Bloch, refers to as the “indignation over assaults upon human dignity.”
