A wry staging of Tartuffe in Dublin — review

This new adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe opens with a techno-fuelled bacchanal in a lavish yet dilapidated banquet room. The atmosphere is cheerfully camp rather than sleazy. But the party seems to have been going on a bit too long. And like the oversized game birds in the mural behind them, the revellers look ripe for the plucking. Would anyone really care if these feckless nobles fell prey to a scheming, upwardly mobile interloper?

Caitríona McLaughlin’s wry staging of Frank McGuinness’s version never comes down on the side of the comedy’s eponymous villain. Their Tartuffe nonetheless weaves a textured moral tapestry where the fools and gadabouts have as little to recommend them as the knave.

Central to that interpretation is Frank McCusker’s portrayal of Orgon, who welcomes the pharisaic Tartuffe into his home. The patriarch’s intrinsic gullibility and empty-headed piety are overlain here with excruciating vanity and boorishness. Early on, he appears in a fruit-salad-print cloak that epitomises the Versace-meets-Versailles aesthetic of Katie Davenport’s costumes and set. In a running gag, he also crashes into his servants with the heedless insouciance of privilege so exorbitant that he barely realises it exists. A dupe whose misjudged benevolence might normally arouse some sympathy thereby becomes contemptible.

His mother Pernelle cuts a similarly uncongenial figure in Geraldine Plunkett’s imperious portrayal. Her dismissal of the widowed Orgon’s new wife Elmire as an “upstart” typifies her snobbery, which has been amplified in McGuinness’s translation. And her censorious religiosity acquires a colonial-themed edge when Pernelle dismisses her family’s dissipated frolics as “ceilidhing” (one of the text’s many Irishisms). This Tartuffe’s Irish setting is lightly worn. But it is not hard to infer a clash here between easy-going Gaelic custom and harsh Planter mores.

The rest of the family aren’t entirely undeserving of Pernelle’s scorn. Orgon’s daughter Mariane (Emma Rose Creaner), his son Damis (Naoise Dunbar) and brother-in-law Cleante (Kevin Trainor) all come across as lacking in agency and purpose. Mariane’s suitor Valere (Emmanuel Okoye) is amiable and sincere but scarcely the master of his destiny.

Only Aislín McGuckin’s Elmire proves a worthy match, in every sense, for Tartuffe. In the climactic seduction scene, her inveiglement of the lascivious imposter displays expert cunning and also perhaps a little genuine longing. As the titular protagonist, Ryan Donaldson remains an ulcerous hypocrite. But he is also shrewd, dynamic and charming. Given Orgon’s doltishness, there is a sense here that Tartuffe and Elmire do belong together.

McGuckin also combines well with Pauline Hutton’s exasperated servant Dorine, who vainly warns her masters against Tartuffe’s machinations. As George Orwell said of 1940s England, this is a family “with the wrong members in control”.

McLaughlin marshals the 12-strong cast with aplomb in her brisk and kinetic two-and-a-half-staging (with an interval). The dialogue at times lapses into cliché, and some of the rhymes are a bit loose. But McGuinness’s version broadly captures the rhythm of Molière’s rhyming couplets and makes it plain that Tartuffe is far from the only hypocrite here.

★★★★☆

To April 8, abbeytheatre.ie