Holy Willie, a Tartuffe to impress the hypocritics

TARTUFFE Gallus Gallic comedy at its finest ★★★★✩

AN avaricious conman of low morals preaching virtue and piety; women told to hold their wheesht and know their place – Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead’s celebrated adaptation of Moliere’s 17th century comedy couldn’t be more topical if it tried.

Lochhead’s original version of Tartuffe first saw the light of day at the Lyceum in 1986. This is a revival of the fast-paced, pareddown Tartuffe that was first performed in 2010 as part of the Classic Cuts season at Oran Mor’s lunchtime theatre programme in Glasgow, and since then it’s lost none of its sparkle.

Set in the 1940s, with only four characters to carry the load, it finds the scheming Holy Willie and snake oil salesman Tartuffe finagling his way into the gullible Orgon’s household and trying to get his feet under more than the table.

Before the hour’s up, he’ll have been offered the hand of Orgon’s young daughter and attempted to seduce his trophy missus, Elmire.

He’ll have got his hands on the deed of covenant to the family home, too, before the play’s moral compass rights itself in just the nick of the time for the beleaguered couple, and their no-nonsense, lie-detector housemaid Dorine, to crack open the Irn-Bru and toast the hypocrite’s demise.

All is served up in broad, irreverent, earthy Scots rhyming couplets delivered at breakneck speed with scurrilous rhymes such as ‘houghmagandie and randy’, but it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans if the cast weren’t up to the task.

Andy Clark plays Tartuffe with high comic slippery salaciousness and faux sincerity – one minute complaining his knees are sore from continually kneeling on cold floors to pray, the next stripped to his long johns with wolf-like fervour.

Nobody does ‘Aye, that’ll be right’ dismissiveness like Joyce Falconer as Dorine, while Grant O’Rourke serves up a fine cocktail of blundering bluster as Orgon and Nicola Roy – ‘the only thing that’s felt is my knee’ – is wonderfully svelte and spiky as the young wife Elmire. Highly recommended. Assembly Rooms, Aug 24-25