Secrets, lies and disguised motives drive the plot in Molière’s comedy from 1664, in which a fraud, Tartuffe (Ryan Donaldson), insinuates himself into a wealthy household, manipulating his host by pretending to be penniless and pious. “You are going to be Tartuffed,” the daughter of the house is warned, before her gullible father Orgon (Frank McCusker) tries to marry her off to the live-in impostor.
Director Caitríona McLaughlin’s lavish production emphasises the artifice and insincerity of this decadent milieu, with conversations held for the benefit of hidden listeners, and doors bursting open to reveal huddled eavesdroppers. With its frescoed dining room and receding corridors, Katie Davenport’s set design creates the sense of a formal domain in which privacy is impossible. Family members are swathed in peacock coloured silks, ever ready to make a histrionic entrance, which helps to explain Orgon’s susceptibility to Tartuffe’s faux simplicity.
With Davenport’s costumes playfully combining styles, and mobile phones and laptops erratically incorporated, the period in which the drama is set is deliberately blurred, slipping between centuries. While this creates a striking stage picture and initial comedy in seeing elaborately coiffed baroque figures strut to Philip Stewart’s pulsing soundtrack, the mashup of periods strips the play of context and bite.
Frank McGuinness’s new version has a blunt, earthy tone, rendered in couplets that sometimes fall flat, despite the best efforts of the ensemble cast, especially McCusker and Aislín McGuckin, playing Orgon’s spirited wife, Elmire. As the object of Tartuffe’s unwanted attentions she has the most to endure amid sexual double standards and hypocrisy.
Since Tartuffe’s religious zeal no longer makes an impact, and is downplayed in Donaldson’s suave performance, this charlatan’s guile and ambition might have been presented in a more contemporary guise: perhaps as an online influencer or a cult leader. That would require fully updating and adapting the text – and staging – to 21st-century power dynamics. Instead, without being anchored in a specific society, time or place, the many potential satirical targets of this classic play are lost, and the question – why stage this now? – remains unanswered.
• Tartuffe is at the Abbey theatre, Dublin until 8 April; then on tour until 13 May
