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Spitting posh platitudes through false teeth so bucked they might enforce a liquid diet, raking one hand across an oily comb-over while the other holds a Bible as tight as a manbag stuffed with gold, Mark Rylance extends the long English tradition of comedy vicars to a French source: Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe, about a trickster who fakes piety to defraud a devout family.
The original targeted the Catholic church, the arrows sharp enough that the archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication to any Catholic who saw the play, forcing Molière to write a new version, The Impostor, where the fakery was less directly sacred.
More recently, the play has taken tweaks to the bogus holiness of the antagonist: at the RSC in 2018 and Birmingham Rep four years later, Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto’s version turned the predatory priest into a fake imam who bamboozles a faithful Muslim family in the Midlands.
Tartuffe (Remixed), writer-director Darren Raymond’s modern update, transplants the drama to the eve of a wedding bringing together Jamaican and Nigerian clans. Both families may well be Anglican, one character lamenting the transforming colonialism of Christian missionaries.
Pastor Blake (as Tartuffe here becomes) is presumably Church of England – or pretending to be – rather than Roman Catholic, as a plot twist retained from the original requires him be offered as a husband. But it’s unclear – other than to allow Rylance to be cast – why these proud families would hire this creepy white guy to preside rather than someone from London’s Black clergy.
This makes it hard to keep faith with Raymond’s spiritual scheme, although broader points are scored about public hypocrisy: the pastor backs charities for homeless people while investing in property companies and professes shame about slavery as a seduction tool.
Some English adaptations prefer prose to approximate the tricky alexandrines of the original but Raymond retains rhyming couplets, alternating clever pairings – “immorality” / “normality”, “psalms” / “my arms” – with blunter runs: “heart” / “smart” / “fart” / “apart.”
Rylance, often playing directly to the audience, has enjoyable moments of excruciating Father-dancing at the wedding and, as the English farce tradition demands, is more than once reduced to his white Y-fronts and vest. Until stymied by an overlong second act, pushing the evening close to three hours, the cast achieves the speed farce needs.
Engaging and likable performances include Usifu Jalloh as the bride’s father Oga and Nakeba Buchanan as stepmother Elmire, the characters who remain closest to Molière’s naming. As bride and groom, Sara Mokonen and Ivandro Da Cruz Leite sparkle together and apart.
Molière satirised a society in which monarchy and church were superpowers, and as with another recent Anglicisation – the Sandra Oh-led The Misanthrope at the National – uprooting from that context can lose political sting and comic logic. “Remixed” risks being reduced.
