This edgy comedy is just what theatre needs
Tartuffe RSC Swan ★★★★★
The RSC has done something that few major subsidised theatres would dare to do. It has planted a comedy about religious hypocrisy and charlatanism amid the Pakistani Muslim community of Birmingham.
This reworking of Molière’s Tartuffe
– which outraged its original subject, the Catholic church, to the extent that the playwright was threatened with excommunication – represents an important decision from Gregory Doran, the RSC’S artistic director.
British theatre has never seemed more worried about giving offence. Yet now at the Swan, audiences are being invited to revel in the spectacle of a man, Tartuffe – in this version known as Tahir Taufiq Arsuf – who’s fraudulently pretending to be the most devout Muslim around.
The pair behind this adaptation, TV comedy writers Anil Gupto and Richard Pinto (who have worked on the biggest British Asian comedy shows of the past 20 years, including Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars at No 42 and Citizen Khan) know what they are doing. Not only have they produced a coherent transposition that works well, they are also asking us to be grown up about the subject of diversity. Surely we should all be able to laugh at different communities, they are saying, while perceiving that the target here is spurious religiosity, not religion per se.
Even so, you’re often torn between laughter and a sharp intake of breath. Levity washes over usually sincere and serious modes of communication. You hear talk of the Qu’ran, there are abundant references to Allah, and when the prophet Mohammed is mentioned you hear the response “peace be upon him” – which, given the anti-hero’s levels of false sanctity, almost sounds like a gag. There’s even a joke about “Proper Muslims. Brown ones”. Aside from avoiding making merry with the burka, Pinto and Gupta have really gone for it.
Iqbal Khan’s zesty production, which uses a predominantly Asian cast, understands that insecurity is the comic and emotional motor of the original narrative. Simon Nagra’s credulous patriarch Imran (Orgon in the original) doesn’t quite know where he belongs – which is what makes him so vulnerable to Asif Khan’s spurious mystic Tahir Taufiq Arsuf, who takes over him and his household.
Arsuf arrives in an attitude of serene composure, eyes shifty beneath his prayer cap, a grey-streaked Bin Laden-like beard completing the pose. That restraint (along with stern scruples about female modesty) is abandoned in the presence of the lady of the house, Sasha Behar’s Amira, who contends with a breast grope and, later, the sight of this weedy interloper dropping his trousers.
As with the original, she tries at length to alert her husband to the lecherous mendacity of their guest but the point is sharply made that the increasingly tyrannical father of the house has effectively self-radicalised. He needs to be brought back to a thoroughly British – and actually perfectly Brummie, and modern Muslim – sense of live and let live.
Complex issues, then, nestle in the midst of the froth – possibly incendiary ones, depending on who’s watching. Just the kind of challenging fare our theatre needs.