Theatre review: The Misanthrope

So far Indhu Rubasingham's first year running the National has provided a run of hit shows for other directors, but the ones she's chosen for herself have met with a more muted response. I personally enjoyed a lot of what Bacchae was doing but a similarly loose reinvention of a classic in the Lyttelton hit bum notes for me. Martin Crimp adapts Molière's The Misanthrope as a vehicle for Sandra Oh and the kind of exhausted stubbornness common to many of her screen characters: Oh's Alice is a highly respected and successful literary novelist, but her pronouncements outside of her books don't make her many friends. She's outspoken about inequality, feminism and race, and has recently been attacked in the press for refusing to renege on comments supporting a particular cause (it's unnamed but strongly implied to be Palestine.)

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.

Theatre review: Tartuffe, the Imposter

Molière’s religious con-man Tartuffe has been around a lot in the past year, but for various reasons (having bronchitis when I was meant to be seeing it in Stratford-upon-Avon; avoiding the Theatre Royal Haymarket like the plague) the National’s is the first of the current crop I’ve caught. And certainly as adapted by John Donnelly and directed by Blanche McIntyre the play shows why so many people have chosen it at this particular moment. Robert Jones’ set is a garishly opulent living room that nods to the play’s origins at Versailles, but the action’s been relocated to Highgate where Orgon (Kevin Doyle,) who made his fortune in unspecified dubious ways, lives with his mother Pernelle (Susan Engel,) daughter Mariane (Kitty Archer,) son Damis (Enyi Okoronkwo,) second wife Elmire (Future Dame Olivia Williams) and her brother Cleante (Hari Dhillon.) All except Pernelle are currently horrified at the puritanical turn the household has taken.

Theatre review: Don Juan in Soho

Having heard there was a stage left in London without one of his shows on it, Patrick Marber directs a revival of his Don Juan in Soho at Wyndham's. A modern relocation of Molière's Don Juan, it does stick to blank verse and a sometimes stylised turn of phrase in among the text speak and swearing. David Tennant plays DJ, heir to an earldom who, with no real demands on his time, chooses to spend all of it chasing after sex. Although he's happy enough to pay for it, he takes particular pleasure in pursuit and corruption, and in the opening scene has just returned from honeymoon: Having pursued the virginal Elvira (Danielle Vitalis) for two years and married her just to get her into bed, he's now got what he wanted and has cheerfully broken her heart, telling her he wants a divorce after a fortnight.

Non-review: The Miser

Professional reviewers get most of the perks but there's one reserved for those of us who pay for our tickets: The right to make a run for it at the halfway point without feeling guilty about it*. So I can't call this a review of the whole of Molière's The Miser, loosely adapted by Sean Foley and Phil Porter, and directed by the former. I didn't actually hate it - if I had I'd probably have stuck it out so I could rip it to shreds with all the information to hand - I just knew by the interval that there was little to be gained from sticking around. In a production that appears to have been cast by watching a week's worth of repeats on Dave, Griff Rhys Jones plays the titular Harpagon, whose children won't see a penny while he's alive, which is a problem as they've both fallen for poorer people: Daughter Elise (Katy Wix) loves butler Valere (Matthew Horne) and son Cleante (Ryan Gage) their neighbour Marianne (Ellie White.)

Theatre review: A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes

Last year Marcus Gardley took loose inspiration from Lorca's bleak The House of Bernarda Alba, to create the serious but hugely entertaining House That Will Not Stand. So I was very much looking forward to him teaming up with director Indhu Rubasingham again for a play based on a much lighter source: A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes is an adaptation of Molière’s satirical farce Tartuffe. The play could also be seen as a comic companion piece to Lucas Hnath's The Christians, as both playwrights are the sons of preachers in American megachurches, and that's where they've set their stories. But unlike Hnath's successful church, Gardley's play takes place in one that's hardly thriving: Tardimus Toof (Lucian Msamati) is the self-styled Apostle whose apparently successful healing of the sick isn't drawing in any cash - although it does give him the chance to hit on the young women he heals, much to the fury of his wife.