A bare stage. Ominous music, a bleakly dark cityscape, a shapeless brown mound of—what? Trash? The mound heaves; a passerby stops and cries out as he discerns that it is alive.
The man and his attendants uncover the mound; strip it, layer-by-layer, of rags; lift the vagrant into a steamy tub (which magically appears); douse, soak, shampoo. As the lights finally come up full, there emerges Tartuffe: gleaming, young, trim, and in what they used to call the altogether.
This is not your traditional Tartuffe. Not your grandfather’s Tartuffe, nor that of your great-great-great-great grand-père. Nor his great-great-great grand-père. Not Molière’s Tartuffe, exactly. Call it the Ivo van Molière edition: The Naked Tartuffe.
Le Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur, took France by storm when it opened and has been seen in innumerable productions and innumerable translations ever since. But history records that the play we know was not what Molière originally wrought. The three-act Le Tartuffe, ou l’Hypocrite, premiered with a command performance for Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles on May 12, 1664. The king is said to have liked the play but immediately banned it under pressure from the church, which vehemently objected to the representation of the title character as a fraudulently hypocritical holy man.
Seeking to rescue his script from oblivion, Molière devised a new version in which his target was not a religious hypocrite but a criminal con man posing as a religious impostor. The five-act Tartuffe was produced in 1669 with the hypocrite of the subtitle replaced by an obvious impostor. Embraced by the king and the people, the play has been running ’round the world ever since. The Comédie-Française, which was founded in 1680 incorporating remnants of the playwright’s acting company (following his death in 1673), has prominently featured Tartuffe over the centuries.
Pardon all this histoire ancienne; it is relevant to the discussion at hand.
There has long been conjecture about that banned three-act version of 1664. When Molière did his cut and paste job, he apparently used the scraps as kindling. (Naif that he was, he neglected to back up his work to the Cloud.) Georges Forestier, a professor of literature and dramaturge specializing in 17th century drama, has assembled (“avec la complicité d’Isabelle Grellet”) a fanciful reconstruction of what he theorizes the play might have been—back before Molière was forced to excise religious hypocrisy and remove some of those harshly satirical fangs.
What better way for the Comédie-Française to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth than with this new/old/new restoration? And how better to make a splash than to invite director Ivo van Hove, the theatrical firebrand who staged their controversial 2016 production of Visconti’s The Damned?
The Tartuffe of the occasion is 33-year-old Christophe Montenez. New Yorkers who caught The Damned when it visited the Park Avenue Armory will likely recall his performance as Martin (the central role played by Helmut Berger in the film version). Also prominent at the Armory was Denis Podalydès, who here makes a compelling and most convincing Orgon. (Podalydès convinces us that Orgon is not fooled by Tartuffe; he is, rather, brainwashed and dazed by the apparent religiosity.) Marina Hands plays an Elmire so lustily eager in the seduction scene with Tartuffe that a scene-title flashes across the video screen—this is a van Hove production, after all—reading “qui piège qui” (“who is trapping whom”). Dominique Blanc (Dorine), Loïc Corbery (Cléante), and Julien Frison (Damis) demonstrate the extraordinary depth of the Comédie-Française acting company.
The physical production provided by the director’s usual comrades—Jan Versweyveld (scenery and lighting) and An D’Huys (costumes)—is up to their usual, starkly arresting standards. The stylishly elegant clothes do not have typical Molièrian flounces, but they are certainly easier to strip off onstage.
This viewer—with little comprehension of French—can only broadly report on the text. Being well versed in traditional English translations of Tartuffe, I can authoritatively report that Orgon’s daughter, Mariane, and her fiancé, Valère, are absent from this version; the characters do not appear in extant 1664 cast lists, so Forestier concludes they were later additions. Thus, the plotline of Orgon’s attempt to force Mariane to wed Tartuffe is gone, as is Valère coming to Orgon’s rescue. Nor do we have the deus ex machina of Orgon’s pardon by the beneficent ruler; this was likely contrived with the distinct aim of gaining the king’s favor, and it worked.
In the final scene here—be it devised by Forestier or perhaps by van Hove—it is several months later and everybody is living together happily ever. A Parisian colleague explained to me that the dialogue relates that Elmire is now pregnant by Tartuffe, while Orgon has taken up with the servant Dorine; I’ll have to take her word for it. She couldn’t quite explain, though, why Orgon’s son, Damis, was suddenly wearing a fetching blue dress. I suppose that’s lost in translation.
Just how much of what we see comes from whom—Molière on the one hand, Forestier and Grellet on the other, van Hove on the third —remains unknown. If you do this sort of tinkering with O’Neill or Miller or Beckett, you’re likely to encounter howls of protests. But there should be a reasonable statute of limitations on these things, and I’d wager that anything more than 350 years old is fair game.
That said, when modern playmakers take a classic and make it their own, it helps if (1) they are visionary; (2) their vision is supported by, and satisfactorily adaptable to, the original; and, (3) they can make the damn thing work. When these conditions are met, as they are in this case, the result is a dramatically vibrant evening of theater. Audiences might love or dislike van Hove’s Tartuffe, which on Sunday concluded its Paris run; but whatever playgoers thought as they spilled out onto Rue de Richelieu, they likely kept on thinking and talking about this dynamic spectacle for days afterword.
Given the Broadway notoriety of van Hove’s A View from the Bridge, The Crucible, and Network, I imagine that this Tartuffe will sooner or later land on our shores. And provocatively so. While there is only one case of full nudity on display, there are more hands-under-clothes and faces-rubbing-crotches than we’ve seen on stage ever. At least since before the pandemic.
A virile, full-frontal Tartuffe is not, perhaps, precisely what Molière had in mind when he penned his comédie. But the notion of an immoral amoral sanctimonious charlatan who thrives by fooling most of the people—or at least, a voting majority—some of the time is, as they say dans la rue, distressingly au courant.
Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur opened January 15, 2022 at the Comédie-Française (Paris) and ran through April 24. Information: comedie-francaise.fr