Amid a month of starry returns to the London stage – Cate Blanchett, Maria Friedman, Tilda Swinton, Sophie Okonedo – the Oscar-winner and great Shakespearean Mark Rylance pitches up in Marylebone as Molière’s duplicitous priest in this cheerfully scrappy reboot.
The script has been reworked by writer/director Darren Raymond, who became friends with Rylance during a drama workshop when he was in prison. Many of the cast are graduates of the charitable training programme and theatre company Intermission Youth that Raymond set up 20 years ago to broaden access to the arts among young people who face social and economic barriers in life, and of which Rylance is patron.
