Caught in the act
Author: Peter Craven
Date: 31/05/1997
Publication: The Sunday Age

Barrie Kosky has dazzled Australian audiences with his theatrical vision.
But with Moliere, says Peter Craven, style can't replace substance...
IT'S THE BETTER PART OF a decade now since Barrie Kosky came to prominence
as a theatre director. I will never forget the shock of seeing his student
production of Don Giovanni and finding it better than that the major
companies mount. Since then, Kosky has gone on to every kind of success.
Now he is doing one of the great classics of the theatre, Moliere's
Tartuffe, in Sydney.

At 30 he is - finally - too old to be described as a wunderkind but he can
still make you wonder. Although his production of Nabucco for Opera
Australia was initially execrated in Sydney, it was one of this country's
more exciting opera productions. His Flying Dutchman, with its biting
austerity and expressionism, was even better.

At the same time there is another side of Kosky which affects his work and
sometimes afflicts his statements about our culture. This is a Kosky who
not only takes himself very seriously indeed, but is inclined to risk
aspects of a whole production for the sake of an idea.

This Tartuffe, which Kosky has done for the Sydney Theatre Company, brings
into relief the weaknesses of a director who once said the text was no
more important than the set.

The first question this new Kosky production raises is why Moliere?

Moliere's plays are among the most difficult comedies in the repertoire.
They require the actors (and their director) to be on the note rather than
under it or hovering round it. Tartuffe, his study of a religious
hypocrite and the seductions of of iniquity is

an especially tough nut. Kosky's production for the Sydney Theatre Company
is a breakneck, visually arresting romp but it doesn't come within a mile
of the humanity of Moliere's comedy.

The difficulty with Moliere is that he has none of the moody extravagance
of Shakespeare or even the great one-liners of Oscar Wilde. The humor is
all a matter of the characters and their situation.

Kosky's solution is to take the situation - family patriarch falls for
arch fiend in pharisaical garb - and wring it by its neck, with maximum
emphasis on frenetic farce. He takes the workable enough Christopher
Hampton translation and allows the actors to Australianise it with a few
bits of vernacular but otherwise does not attempt to to modernise the
language.

The upshot is a kind of anachronistic nightmare in which ineffectual
family dads mutter about patriarchy and "the Premier" is substituted for
the absolutist monarchy of the Sun King.

This would matter less if the production had its roots in any reality,
however stylised or zanified, but it doesn't. Peter Corrigan has given
Kosky a dashing set, though what Kosky gestures to is a shadowy homage to
the domestic horror world of a Robert Crum cartoon.

The characters are always caricatures before they are the stylisation of
human types and the action (as well as the acting) is cruder of line than
the, admittedly exciting, conception of the whole.

At one point the disturbed and ugly daughter of the family (Di Adams)
vomits into the inside of a cooked chicken. In one of his moments of
overweening pride Tartuffe urinates into a carafe meant for white wine.
After order has been restored Orgon, the master of the house, reaches for
that carafe for an absent-minded drink.

Maybe it's an elaborate conceit for "taking the piss" but it is
characteristic of this strident though wilful version of Tartuffe. Peter
Corrigan's design keeps nudging us towards the '60s of Jules Feiffer's
Little Murders but Kosky shows little feeling for the familial,
heterosexual resonances - let alone the suburban Australian ones - that
Corrigan might see as a parody of the mixture.

The actors, alas, get lost in the puppet play. Paul Blackwell's Orgon is
too fey and daffy, too lacking in dramatic authority to indicate even a
loss of control. Louise Fox, as Dorine, is the merest whiney sketch of
working class Australian womanhood and the shapeless sack emphasising
pregnancy seems emblematic of Kosky's emphasis - an emphasis amounting to
misogyny - on the ugliness of women that dominates this production like a
nervous tick or fatal flaw.

The only female who escapes this is Melta Jurisic who plays Elmire, the
wife and mother, in a kind of elaborately mocking homage to the
Jean-Pierre Mignon style of doing Moliere. The directorial intention is at
least interesting here but the effect misfires.

As do most things. Of course there are consistently striking moments.
Damis (Mitchell Buter), the son of the family, shooting up under a
Christmas tree; David Wenham as the sententious brother-in-law Cleante who
brings the character alive as an out-and-out limpwrist, but all too often
Kosky's cast look like wind-up mechanical toys simulating TV animation.
Let's not beat about the bush: this makes The Simpsons look like Comedie
Francaise.

Tartuffe is one of the greatest parts of the theatre, a comic Iago of
shadows and simulations. Alone in this production Jacek Koman in the title
role is well cast and achieves a few moments of authority and inwardness,
but even he is half smothered by Kosky's high-jinks.

It is not that he has to wear a Mormon's white shirt and black tie. That
doesn't matter in itself, though it's continuous with the boorishness and
failure of high comic elan that underlies the zip and electricity of this
production.

There is plenty of zip. At one moment the characters skitter across the
top of the stage in what Corrigan makes look like a series of '60s feature
walls changing from one vibrant color to the another. The theatrical
moment is dashing but the overall effect of this Tartuffe is
uncomprehending. Kosky's production does not make him look like an heir of
Peter Brook. Indeed in this production he has nothing like the stature of
the director of those fine recent productions of Nabucco and The Flying
Dutchman. It is more as though Mozart were being played by an
under-rehearsed, over-confident school band. The conductor has plenty of
cheek but he doesn't know what to do with all those notes.

Don't get me wrong. Kosky is one of the treasures of the Australian
theatre but he should not allow his recognition of this fact to make him
precious. He seems to have a natural attraction to the Renaissance and
neo-classical masterpieces of the stage, like Shakespeare and Moliere,
perhaps because he conceived of them as more operatic than their
successors.

They are. But he should beware of imagining that their pre-realist theatre
can be reduced, in puppet master fashion, to a stylised evasion of
emotional reality.

The most notable lack in his production of Tartuffe is any emotional
tension between what the actors bring to the parts and the directorial
conception of the chap who wants to put them through their paces.

What Tartuffe shows is that if he is removed from the pure emotionalism,
the naked equation of form and feeling that opera allows, Kosky, faced
with the prospect of a subtle, text-based theatre, is a more fledgling and
brashly uncertain director than his reputation might suggest.

One can only trust that when and if this production is restaged in
Melbourne it gets the humane and humorous face-lift it requires