Jason Furman's Reviews > The Imaginary Invalid

I find this play hilarious and endearing. Argon, a severe hypochondriac is being taken advantage of by his second wife and his doctors, misled by his daughter and her lover, and finally honestly reckoned with by his brother who has a dialogue with him about the fraudulence of medicine. It is a silly farce, it would be wrong to compare to anything Shakespeare wrote--the characters are all one dimensional and do not change (except Argon who changes in an abrupt and predictable way based on a farcical trick he plays)--but it is enjoyable.

Note this is one of Molière's prose plays, many of his others are in rhyming couplets. It is delightfully translated by two people who have mostly translated Russian classics (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) along with Richard Nelson.