Theatre review: Tartuffe (Remixed)

Mark Rylance helps promote Intermission Youth, a community theatre project he's long been a fan of, by starring alongside a cast including alumni of Darren Raymond's company in a new version of Molière's Tartuffe. The 17th century satire of hypocrisy and the ease with which the unscrupulous can use religion to con the unwary always feels ripe for reinvention and Tartuffe Open Brackets Remixed Close Brackets relocates the story to a modern-day blended British-Nigerian-Jamaican family, as Rylance's Pastor Blake takes advantage of toxic patriarchy to wrap them all round his finger. Adanna (Sara Mokonen) is due to marry Sinclair (Ivandro Da Cruz Leite,) and everything's going well between the families until her father Oga (Usifu Jalloh) suddenly decides the groom isn't religious enough to marry his daughter.

He does have an alternative husband in mind for her: Pastor Blake, who just so happens to be the one who planted the idea that piety should be the only value worth looking for in a potential son-in-law - well above actually loving the bride.

His new guru is also getting Oga to sign quite a lot of legal documents without looking at them too carefully, and eyeing up Grandma's (Suzette Llewellyn) savings, but trying to seduce Oga's second wife Elmire (Nakeba Buchanan) might be taking on the one person who can beat him at his own game.

This is a much more rough-and-ready approach to Molière than the National's most recent attempt, but a hell of a lot more entertaining. Given it's more often than not the thing I complain about the most, perhaps the most impressive thing about Raymond's script is that he's kept the whole thing in rhyming couplets and made it work for the entire length of the play. So instead of smug, convoluted plays on words there's just the right level of tongue-in-cheek silliness and laboured rhymes - Nike/Crikey - to make the lines actually funny.

Never one to go for a character interpretation that makes sense, Rylance's Tartuffe figure becomes a 1970s sitcom vicar, complete with buck teeth and sandals with socks. It's an odd fit to have seduced an ageing Nigerian man you'd expect to have come from a more charismatic church background, but after a while you just accept it as a kind of surreal element of the story.

The character is sparingly used in the first act but gets a lot more, and sillier things to do after the interval as he pushes his luck with Elmire. This is where Raymond's production embraces the sex farce elements, and in a cast with a very diverse range of experience it's Buchanan who most confidently holds her own against the Oscar-winning ham hock, although Morenike Onajobi as Adanna's no-nonsense friend Kemi also has some scene-stealing comic moments.

The show loses some of the necessary pace due to the seemingly non-stop movement of furniture on and off ULTZ' set, and Raymond flubs the ending somewhat with a drawn-out sequence that seems designed to reassure the audience he means no religious offense - ironic in a play that nearly got its original author excommunicated. But if the details are sometimes clumsy at least the show has funny bones.

Tartuffe (Remixed) by Darren Raymond after Molière is booking until the 24th of October at Marylebone Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.