New Looks For Old Plays

Two famous works–Tartuffe and Equus–are given different twists

- Michael Billington

MOLIÈRE’S great comedy Tartuffe is an obliging play that can be adapted to multiple settings. At the first night of the enjoyable new production at the Lyttelton, SE1, I bumped into Jatinder Verma, who, in 1990, staged a version for the National Theatre set in Mogul India. Last year, the RSC hilariously transposed the action to Birmingham’s British Pakistani community and, in John Donnelly’s update, we’re in a posh town house in Highgate—clearly, Molière’s satire on religious hypocrisy can take place anywhere at any time.

The striking feature here is that the focus is on bourgeois guilt. Orgon, who invites the disruptive Tartuffe into his home, is played as a panic-stricken figure, who fears exposure over criminal insider dealing.

Having discovered Tartuffe, a New Age hippie, in some wayside hovel, he treats him as his confidant and confessor. Everyone, except Orgon and his mother, sees that Tartuffe is a greedy, lecherous rogue. Only in the great scene in which a hidden Orgon sees his wife being seduced by Tartuffe does the deluded host come to his senses.

I have one major reservation with this premise: the social detail is never as precise as it was in the RSC version, in which Orgon became a parvenu patriarch under the spell of a fake imam. Here, Orgon is a pillar of the establishment, who served in ‘the last rather ill-advised war’ and made a fortune ‘during the recent upheavals’, but which war and what upheavals?