Tartuffe goes Tinsel Town
Author: Paul McGillick
Date: 22/05/1997
Publication: The Financial Review

Barry Kosky's Tartuffe is a profound misreading of Moliere's original,
writes Paul McGillick.

The posters for this production proclaim: Kosky - Tartuffe. It certainly
isn't Moliere's Tartuffe. But Kosky preempts this kind of remark. At the
denouement of the play, he has the King's messenger descend as a 17th
century fop declaiming in French about "travesty of Moliere" and making
other remarks attributable to fogies who don't like their classics
updated.

But making it a choice between a museum version and an interpretive
free-for-all is to spike the debate before it starts. The real issue is
how to illuminate the 1669 text for a contemporary audience.

Kosky, though, puts as much distance as possible between text and
audience. This implies the audience is incapable of thinking for itself.
Or it could be inferred that Kosky himself does not have a point of view
about the text. But then Kosky has always treated texts as Trojan horses -
excuses for doing his own thing. Of the many disappointing things about
this latest concoction is its predictability - Kosky is fast becoming a
caricature of himself.

Moliere's Tartuffe (as distinct from Kosky's spectacle) is subtle. This
story about an otherwise intelligent man (Orgon) who is so incapable of
distinguishing between reality and appearance that he signs over his
property to an egregious priest (Tartuffe), is hard to pin down. Its
effectiveness depends on the actors' ability to communicate complex
motives. If there is a message, it is that people are complex in a
simultaneously comic and pathetic way.

But Kosky is not one for subtleties. His version is a comic strip laced
with vulgarity, violence and cynicism.

This is a profound misreading of the play. Since the play is actually a
satire on moral absolutism, Kosky's nihilism makes him guilty of the very
thing Moliere is attacking.

The distortion of Moliere's intentions is nowhere clearer than in Cleante,
Orgon's brother-in-law, who warns Orgon about his fixation on Tartuffe.
David Wenham is required to play him as an insincere and stupid queen.
Actually, his humanist assertion that vice and virtue cannot be absolutely
separated is crucial to the play. Given that there seems to be an
intention to "Australianise" the play - Christopher Hampton's translation
is embroidered with broad Australian idioms, four-letter words and local
references - audiences will ponder just how Kosky views his countrymen.

This is a production with a sense of the ridiculous but no sense of humour
and which substitutes meretriciousness for a close reading of the text. *

Tartuffe. By Moliere. Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until June 28.