Galen Watson's Blog: The Psalter - Posts Tagged "tartuffe"

It was great fun to see Molière’s jab at 17th-century church hypocrisy, delivered in his play, Tartuffe, at Reno, Nevada’s Little Theater. I can almost see Louis XIV winking, as he gave his favorite dramatist the nod to excoriate religious greed--that hides behind the guise of piety--in exchange for a plug for the king. If you think the renaissance comedy isn’t relevant in today’s world, think televangelists.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s English version was well done, indeed, and the acting was…well, the translation was very good. The actor who played Tartuffe was excellent, and I could virtually envision the avarice and lechery dripping from his symbols of piety. The supporting actors, on the other hand, rushed their lines and their wooden emotions seemed cartoonish, as though they were performing a Snidely Whiplash and Polly Pureheart, over-the-top melodrama.

Too bad. The director didn’t seem to get that Molière gave the world the best-known comedies in the genre of the ‘comedy of manners,’ a vehicle that Oscar Wilde used so brilliantly. To get the sense of Molière’s wry wit and irony, lines and physical interpretation of emotion have to be delivered sincerely—although perhaps exaggerated--as though the cast are the straight-men counterpoint to Tartuffe’s debauchery. So many times, I had to close my eyes to let the effect of Moliere’s words deliver me, because the cast simply didn’t—with the exception of the superbly interpreted Tartuffe character.