Tartuffe - Johnny Dean

My son, George (the one who is training as an actor), and I recently went to an open-air production at Killerton House. We were seated on the lawn to the west side of the property, near the cafe. It was a glorious setting overlooking the great sweep of the Exe Valley. The play was Molière's Tartuffe, performed by a south-west company called Miracle Theatre. I hope to entice them to Exeter when we have achieved the informal amphitheatre shape around the cathedral's west front. Tartuffe is about the dangers of religious hypocrisy. That makes it sound rather serious, but Molière's play is a comic farce — fast-moving, witty, absurd and very funny. Miracle's cast put all that over very effectively so we, along with the rest of the good-sized audience, were laughing or smiling most of the way through.

The play is set on the garden terrace of a well-to-do house. The cast consists of a father, who is rather naive and pompous; his second, and rather younger, wife; his grown-up, but unmarried, son and daughter; his mother; their house maid/servant; a captain of police who is engaged to the daughter; and Tartuffe, the villain of the piece. In this freshly-translated version, which used modern-idiom prose rather than the rhyming couplets of Molière's original French, the eight characters are played by six actors, with the wife doubling as the police captain and Tartuffe also playing the grandmother.

As I have noticed before with Molière, he gives his servants very distinct characters and a high degree of cheekiness. This one sits in the presence of the family with her feet up on the garden table, tells the father what's what in plain language and disappears behind the wall with the son, perhaps for her own little liaison? The father has been taken in by Tartuffe, whom he encounters as a penniless, but distinctly pious, beggar. He takes Tartuffe home and gradually falls under the spell of a consummately-clever religious con man. At the beginning of the play he is quoting Tartuffe's diatribes against any kind of moral lapses. He quickly decides that his daughter should marry Tartuffe instead of the police captain and also signs away his possessions to the con man.

Meanwhile Tartuffe is rumbled by the rest of the family, who can see signs of greed, gluttony and lust. The wife, the servant and the daughter all speak of his amorous advances to them. In one hilarious scene the wife hides her husband under her skirts so he can observe Tartuffe trying to seduce her. By the time the naive father finally sees through him, Tartuffe has secured not only the signed deed giving him the house, but also a dangerous box with incriminating evidence against the poor, deluded man. A bailiff arrives and all seems lost till the police captain saves the day by discovering Tartuffe's earlier crimes.

The play's underlying message is serious. Serious enough to get the original play banned by the 17th-century church in France, despite the king's evident delight in it. There is one scene where everyone is urged not to think that either Christianity, or most of its followers, are like Tartuffe; but overall the condemnation of religious hypocrisy and fanatical piety is all the sharper for its comic setting. Actually, Jesus' condemnation of religious hypocrisy is just as sharp and would also have made his first listeners laugh.