Boring sandwich, great bread: Tartuffe at the National Theatre
Tartuffe
Lyttelton, National Theatre
Stalls D28, £15
16 March 2019
NT page
Celebration comes with codicils in the National’s latest Tartuffe, splendidly designed Robert Jones in a revision by John Donnelly that packs a powerful political punch but nonetheless had me squirming with embarrassment for much of the duration. The opening titillated me, the ending sobered me – is that enough to forgive the middle?
Donnelly turns Molière on his head by making Tartuffe the sympathetic underdog, cruelly treated by an outrageously unequal and corrupt elite that looks after its own and lets all else go hang. I don’t know enough about Molière to know whether there is even a glimmer of this interpretation in the original; given the text’s face value I suspect not, and to a reprobate traditionalist like me that can’t help but seem something of an obnoxious inversion. But that said, rising inequality is the other story of our time, and if Donnelly wants to speak truth then he has the right axe to grind. Even if the issue is crowbarred into a play about a very different thing, the crowbarring has a jeweller’s deft handling: I left the theatre with my head and eyes full of thoughts of today’s injustices and that familiar old helpless despair.
The ground is laid for Donnelly’s closing one-two by Jones’s designs, which in both set and costume establish a world of extravagantly outrageous wealth. The first few minutes of the play provide a miniature feast for the senses, a dainty hors d’oeuvre, as we go from the simply dressed Tartuffe throwing daffodils to the audience against the Lytellton’s austere fire curtain to the glitz and silks of an Islington town house in the hands of a family where ostentatious display is the pole star. (I wonder how much it cost the National.)
But while it was fun to admire the snazzy set and pretty costumes, it wasn’t sufficient entertainment to make up for a shortfall of everything else in the interim between the beginning and the ending. In hindsight, this is probably no surprise: slapstick comedy is not really my thing, and Donnelly and director Blanche McIntyre are admirably (if, as far as I’m concerned, wretchedly) true to some sort of Platonic ideal of French farce that involves all kind of tedious shenanigans.
Even allowing for taste, some of this stuff is objectively bad: any scene involving Kitty Archer as Mariane or Susan Engel as Pernelle is excruciatingly stilted; the humour put forth by Geoffrey Lumb as Valère is so broad that, edgeless, it ceases to exist; the climactic scene of the seduction/rape of Elmire, played by Olivia Williams, puzzles in a mire of stretchy underwear. Even Kevin Doyle as Orgon, despite moments of grace, shouts his way through like a man left alone in a dark room.
In this context the still calm of Denis O’Hare as Tartuffe is a welcome presence, even if he has to put out his own portion of boring wriggling. He more than anyone else on stage seems to have a clear conception of his character and what means he will use to convey that character: he has an air of deliberated, practised craft that might in other plays feel too lacking in spontaneity but here is the thoughtful underpinning the required gurning needs. He is the heart of the play and its sense, to Donnelly’s advantage if not to Molière’s.
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