French lessons with a seriously smarmy swami
Tartuffe (Theatre Royal Haymarket) Verdict: Parlez-vous Français? Consent (Harold Pinter Theatre) Verdict: Legal eagles
THEY have gone bilingual at the Haymarket, with a version of Moliere’s Tartuffe performed half in French. You may soon tire of the subtitled translations. Moliere’s rhyming couplets are not easy on a digital reader. They come in dollops of script longer than the eye can swallow at a glance.
Tartuffe landed Moliere in trouble with the 17th-century French Church. Had it not been for his patron Louis XIV, he could have been excommunicated for this satire on hypocritical moralising. Previously penniless preacher Tartuffe exerts a grip over rich Orgon and so inveigles his way into the plutocrat’s life that Orgon starts offering him riches and even the hand of his reluctant daughter.
Yet the so- called man of God is not much interested in young Mariane. He lusts more for Orgon’s wife Elmire. Only when Elmire engineers a temptation scene (with Orgon hiding under a table while Tartuffe does his seduction routine) does dim-witted Orgon see he has been taken for a fool.
Even then, Orgon is saved only when (in the original) the Bourbon king intercedes to restore justice.
This Christopher Hampton adaptation is set in 21st- century America. Orgon (Sebastian Roché) is a French tycoon who has emigrated to the US.
Tartuffe is a medallioned, white-robed evangelist, of the sort that occasionally hypnotises gullible Californians. Paul Anderson gives him the leathery air of a new-age swami.
Audrey Fleurot plays Elmire in strikingly curvaceous dresses — she could almost be a mermaid. The production is hampered by a large glass box in which some of the action occurs, and by an over-respectful approach to French rhyming couplets. Quelle
The actors inject depressingly little of themselves, so n paralysed are they by respect for the text. Claude Perron, playing Orgon’s servant Dorine, struggles nobly to create some variety but the comedy is sparse.
In the final scene the buttoned-up tone disperses bizarrely when the deus ex
machina edict of the King is replaced by a pardon from the U.S. President. Cue much forced hilarity about the supposed enlightenment of this head of state.
Moliere is not easy. His plays can work as frenetic farce, but if you try to keep it buttoned- up, as this show does, you bore your audience.
yawn. NINA RAINE has written a high- octane, highbrow, hightension play about yuppie London lawyers.
The play, which I caught last week at an early preview, may on one level be about a working- class woman who claims to have been raped and is promptly crushed in court by one of these barristers.
Yet the ‘consent’ of the title is not only about consent to sex. It may equally be about the consent necessary in a home, not just in the bedroom but in all aspects of a marriage.
Playwright Raine gives us two main couples: Kitty and her shrewd barrister husband Ed; Rachel and husband Jake, who at first seems even more obnoxious than Ed.
BUTthings unravel in their thrusting lives. The marriages are placed under strain. Assumptions evaporate.
Miss Raine skilfully creates a world in which everything has more than one side. As divorce lawyer Rachel notes, two people can relate truthfully an event which may sound very different from their two honest accounts.
To accompany the spare, taut writing, director Roger Michell conjures a swish, minimalist production.
The show includes two of my favourite actors — Claudie Blakely as Kitty and Adam James as the suave, scornful Jake.
Is Stephen Campbell Moore too trendy to be a lawyer? Lee Ingleby’s slightly more gawky Tim, another barrister, was more convincing.
One character uses the phrase ‘intellectual origami’ and a harsher critic might offer that as a description of the plot.
But I was moderately gripped. Disturbed, too. How unhappy our young professionals seem to be, squandering so much of their lives to anxiety. Nina Raine catches that well.