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.
