Theatre Royal, Haymarket
29th May, 2018
“Love without scandal. Pleasure without fear”.
What a bizarre venture Gérald
Garutti’s production of Molière’s Tartuffe
this is. Half French, half English, a half-baked Trump satire set in present-day
LA with a commandeering glass box which is theatre-ese for modern and European,
it hasn’t convinced me that it’s the finest play in the French canon. Yet, for
its sexy design, its novelty, and its ambition, it is oddly enjoyable.
Garutti’s decision to set the play
in Los Angeles works: he has lampooned the heart of a materialistic,
self-indulgent and debauched society. Orgon has become a French billionaire
whose whole family has apparently migrated with him for a taste of Hollywood.
Into that comes the charismatic, evangelical Tartuffe who has blinded Orgon to
welcome him into his home. Soon enough, he is dressing like Tartuffe, besotted
with his welfare and allowing him to walk over his family in the search for
enlightenment. For Orgon and his mother, Tartuffe offers a way forward from the
inanities of the modern world.
The problem is Christopher
Hampton’s bilingual translation. He has given it, in his words, ‘the minimum of
tweaks’. The play starts with a party; champagne bottles and drunken house
guests roll around the stage. This is pretty much the only glimpse we get of
this apparently selfish world until the fifth act, when the play bends over
backwards to become topical, with a US President character launching into a
string of Trump references from Twitter to ‘pussy-grabbing’. In aiming to
emphasise the play’s endurance as well as put a contemporary spin on it,
Hampton has achieved neither with any real verve and so doesn’t quite align
with Garutti’s vision. What’s more is the difficulty surrounding the production
being played in French and English. Thematically, I suppose it just about makes
sense in that characters feel forced to speak in English in the presence of
Tartuffe, such is his power (or ignorance). But other than that, it is at best
literary showboating and at worst a distraction.
Of the performances, some of which
are at odds with others, Paul Anderson’s Tartuffe is the most memorable. Roaming
the stage barefoot and in linen clothes, he is a southern ersatz preacher, in a
similar light to Michael Keaton in the ‘Wheels of Fortune’ episode of Frasier but even more shameful. His
eccentricity turns Sebastian Roché’s seemingly rational Orgon to an obsequious
smarm, flitting from one excess to the other. Hampton’s translation is at its
best in a scene where Anderson is pronouncing his true self (‘C’est vrai, mon
frère, je suis merchant. Un coupable’) only for Roché to bounce his self-condemnations back
with compliments. Is the line between appearance and reality or truth and
deception always so clear cut? Is Anderson’s Tartuffe purely a very talented fraud,
or partly lost in his own invention? Audrey Fleurot is superb as Elmire.
Walking the stage in Oscar ceremony dresses and striking red hair, she plays no
fool to either Tartuffe or Orgon. Andrew D Edwards’ chic design – marble
floors, swimming pools, glass, and wall to floor curtains – is aesthetically
pleasing. Its coolness blends well with Paul Anderson’s lighting: a mix of
purple and orange, aqua blue and flashes of red. Towards the climax, the box pushes
forward with Tartuffe’s hands gently resting on the glass and the weight of the
rest of the cast pushing it back. But if this is meant to represent the
persecution of organised religion, as Garutti suggests, I’m not that convinced.
Tartuffe is a play
all about seeming. Well this seems a missed opportunity. But nonetheless a watchable
one.
Tartuffe is playing
at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket until 28th July.
Paul Anderson and Audrey Fleurot in Tartuffe. Credit: Helen Maybanks |
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