Having relocated a Lorca play to Louisiana in The House That Will Not Stand, Marcus Gardley now transfers Molière’s Tartuffe to Atlanta, Georgia. The result, described as “a farce with music”, has bags of energy and linguistic brio, but is far less subversive than its sublime source.
Molière’s original play is as much an attack on credulity as on charlatanism. Gardley’s focus, however, is on a hedonistic healer, Tardimus Toof, who decides to fleece a dying tycoon, Archibald Organdy, ostensibly to save his church from ruin. A southern preacher addicted to sex and money and claiming, as he disrobes female clients, that “I undress sin” is too easy a target. As if realising this, Gardley complicates matters by suggesting that Toof has genuine healing powers and is in thrall to his domineering wife.
By the end, when Toof launches a tirade against God’s indifference to human suffering, I wasn’t sure whether the play was an assault on religion or simply on those who exploit it to pursue their own ends.
Even if the play is confusing where Molière is ambivalent, Indhu Rubasingham’s fast-moving production has some terrific hot-gospelling interludes, and Gardley writes a jet-fuelled prose, often with hidden rhymes.
The high point is a confrontation between Toof’s wife, played by the magnificently stately Sharon D Clarke, and his victim’s mistress, whom Adjoa Andoh endows with a real relish for phrases such as, “I am a thick, golden brown, brick-house goddess of voluptuous lusciousness.” Lucian Msamati makes Toof a plausible, shiny-suited mixture of charmer and con artist, and Karl Queensborough is quietly funny as the tycoon’s son whose dream is to be an air stewardess.
The play scoops up a lot of laughs but Molière’s original target, the danger of blind faith, emerges unscathed.
• At The Tricycle until 14 November. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
