When B produced his second Misanthrope, he gave two reasons for doing it: “It's hard to say why I love The Misanthrope. If you definitely can say that you love a woman, you have stopped loving her, right? Perhaps I have a misanthrope inside me?” When he produced the play for the third time, in 1995, there was an added reason; in the theatre program it says:

B left it to the audience to guess what he had earlier not understood but now, in his third attempt, apparently had comprehended. He later indicated that Alceste should be done not as a young rebel but as “an aging man” who has suffered a “bitter fiasco” (Sjögren, 2002: 143). Yet in his 1995 production Alceste was on the contrary remarkably young. The new insight applied instead to Célimene. To Andréason in Göteborgs-Posten it meant that the traditional picture of her was turned around. “Instead of a pleasure-seeking devil she is a woman who has seen through the men's vanity and stupidity.”

The Misanthrope is an enigmatic play, open to various interpretations. B abstained from the rather strongly period-oriented approaches he had applied in his earlier productions and was, as we shall see, this time more interested in updating the play. The production became a suggestive floating between 17th century costumes and manners, and 20th century allusions on a bare, universal stage. Fundamental was of course Alceste's and Célimene's contrasting experience of life; they are in that respect “each other's halves” (Sjöman, 1969: 92).

Responsible for the new translation was Hans Alfredson, a well-known writer, actor, and cabaretier in Sweden. The classical alexandrine used in Le Misanthrope is a twelve-syllable line, in which each syllable is separately pronounced, and given equal weight. The lines rhyme aa bb cc dd ff etc. In his translation, Alfredson remarks in the theatre program, he resorts to what he calls “softened alexandrines” rhyming abc abc de de ff. Indicating another translation problem, he notes that rhyming in French, where many words have the same ending, is easier than in Swedish.