Stage-to-screen review: Tartuffe (BBC iPlayer)

Next up in my digital theatre catch-up is a production I'm pretty sure I had been due to see at the RSC's Swan, but had to skip when I got ill. A couple of years later Iqbal Khan's production of Tartuffe moved up to Birmingham, where Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto's adaptation is set, and that's where it was filmed for the BBC. Molière's farce is a satire on religious hypocrisy, and here the con-man posing as a holy man becomes a fake Imam, manipulating and destroying a well-off British-Pakistani family for his own ends. In place of a servant we have a Bosnian cleaning lady, Darina (Olga Fedori,) who acts as a chorus figure and outside eye on the Pervaiz family, whose patriarch Imran (Simon Nagra) has been charmed by the wise and pious words of a seemingly homeless man he met at the mosque. He's invited him to live in the family home, and pretty soon he's reliant on Tartuffe's words for every decision he makes in his life.

So he's been turned against his son Damee (Salman Akhtar,) and the wedding of his daughter Mariam (Anshula Bain) to the nice but wet Waqaas (Qasim Mahmood) has been cancelled in favour of a forced arranged marriage to his new spiritual guide, who seems poised to become heir to the family home and business.

This is an interesting choice of genre to film for home viewing because it's quite a broad style of comedy that doesn't necessarily translate when you're not in the room, surrounded by a laughing audience (in fact at first I was worried this might be one of those horrible recordings done in an empty theatre, but it just seems the volume on the audience is fairly low, and their reactions eventually become more audible.) In fact the whole thing doesn't entirely kick into gear until we finally get the arrival of Asif Khan as the con-man himself.

Khan's Tartuffe is a nice balance of the comic grotesque needed to get the comedy going - Riad Richie as his fawning henchman helps dial up the ridiculousness - with a genuinely sinister element that really gives bite to the satirical side of things. There's a real edge of danger in the way he preaches purity while trying to molest Imran's wife Amira (Natalia Campbell,) and preaches poverty while taking advantage of the family's luxuries, all the while insinuating himself into their lives to collect enough secrets to blackmail them with if necessary.

But the particular element of religious hypocrisy Gupta and Pinto are most focused on here is the suppression of women's voices and rights in the name of scripture - where, of course, any room for interpretation will always be decided by which reading of the text means the man speaking is right. The family's accountant Khalil (Roderick Smith) also gets to confront Tartuffe on how Islam was meant to be a religion of science and progress, until it was co-opted by men whose purposes were better served by throwbacks to an imagined past. The shifting of the story to a muslim family also suggests a secondary theme of how a general atmosphere of prejudice will allow these more manipulative and extreme voices to thrive, causing a vicious cycle.

The more serious themes of both original and adaptation don't drown out the comedy though, and while it definitely takes a while to warm up, and no doubt benefited from the atmosphere of being seen in person, there's a lot to enjoy here. The writers avoid replicating Molière's rhyming couplets unless it's for a gag (or for Tartuffe and Damee's argument to take the form of a rap battle) so the show gets to retain its own distinctively Brummie rhythm and style, while showing us how modern concerns about extremism and radicalisation follow a familiar pattern that a French playwright saw centuries ago.

Tartuffe by Molière, in a version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, is available to stream in the UK on BBC iPlayer.

Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.

Photo credit: Geraint Lewis.