In France the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth is being celebrated in a big way. In Britain it has been greeted with a deafening silence. But then we have always been slightly wary of Molière. It is partly that we lack the histrionic tradition that led CE Montague to write that watching French actors play Molière was “like turning over a portfolio of old and choice theatrical prints”. It is also the difficulty of translation: I can think of a handful of good ones – including Tony Harrison’s The Misanthrope, Christopher Hampton’s Don Juan and Ranjit Bolt’s The School for Wives – but many that are rough without being ready.
We seem much happier doing adaptations and one play that comes up repeatedly is Tartuffe. It is not hard to see why: hypocrisy, especially if it is religious, is always with us. Even Shakespeare jokes about it in Twelfth Night when Feste, donning a curate’s robe, says: “I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown.” But Molière’s Tartuffe is much the greatest play on the subject and has prompted any number of transpositions: the two best I have seen both made use, in radically different ways, of Asian culture.
