‘Tartuffe’ review

The NT’s last big comedia dell'arte revival was, of course, ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’. A near flawless piece of comedy theatre, it was crafted via playwright Richard Bean ruthlessly paring away all but the funniest stuff in Goldoni’s ‘The Servant of Two Masters’ and then rebuilding it from scratch.

Here, John Donnelly’s adaptation of Molière's classic 1664 farce about a charismatic charlatan feels caught between updating the jokes and updating the morality. There are a lot of killer lines, but there’s also a lot of padding between those killer lines, as Donnelly’s script savagely contorts itself to square the fact that the wealthy Orgon (Kevin Doyle) and his family may deserve the humiliation they experience at the hands of the eponymous conman.

In practice this means a lot of talking: Blanche McIntyre’s production is long, and thin on laughs as it laboriously builds up the context, with Denis O’Hare’s non-specifically Euro-accented Tartuffe only appearing the best part of an hour in.

When he does arrive, US star O'Hare is impressively skin crawly. One of the script’s more subtle aspects is that Tartuffe is never explained away - we’re led to believe his vague European-ness is a sham, but that’s about it. He is a small, lank haired man who shuffles around in his pants like some sort of spreading ooze, seeping into every part of the life of everyone in Orgon’s household via a mix of audacity and malevolence. With his cod-spiritualism, he’s like that dickhead with a guitar you met at a hostel, grown into an unstoppable force. And he is, of course, a living emblem of how far men can get if they simply refuse to take no as an answer.

There is an underlying rage underpinning Donnelly’s script, both at the treatment of women, but also the entitlement of Orgon and family. It comes furiously to the fore in the brutal final scene, which smartly subverts Molière's slightly lame ending, and suggests Orgon is as much a charlatan as Tartuffe. But for the most part this anger feels awkwardly entwined with respect for Molière. The best character, Tartuffe, doesn’t appear until an hour in, because that’s what happens in the original; there are a lot of laboured jokes about the fact the original was in rhyming verse and this isn’t; it is extremely talky.

There’s a lovely shabby chic set from Robert Jones, some nice directorial flourishes from McIntyre and her physical comedy director Toby Park (like characters constantly popping out of nowhere), and if the cast isn’t the comedy A-team ‘1M2G’ was blessed with, you do have Olivia frickin’ Williams cutting loose enjoyably in the role of Orgon’s seething American wife Elmire.

It would have been better off committing to being either very funny or very angry. Caught in between, it’s an interesting project, but feels totally overshadowed by Bean’s blockbuster.