The Trumped-Up Molière: How a Bilingual Comedy Took London by Storm in the Trump Era

On a warm June evening in 2018, an audience of young, affluent Londoners was doing something that had never been done on the West End: watching a play switch between English and French, following surtitles projected in various locations around the stage, and calling for encores at the end. The Theatre Royal Haymarket is one of London’s oldest and most formally beautiful theatres, the kind of place where the red carpet and the gilded ceiling suggest a certain decorum is expected.

Even though they were seated in the same room, the newspaper critics’ experiences differed.
The Times described it as “Merde, what a mess.” A pretentious mess, painful. According to the Daily Telegraph, it was “frankly maladroit” and “induced tears of frustration.” Depending on what they were looking for, both the audience and the critics might have been correct. The division between the press gallery and the stalls proved to be one of the production’s more intriguing aspects and, considering the play’s true subject, perhaps its most appropriate.

Molière’s Tartuffe, a 17th-century French comedy about religious hypocrisy, was relocated to Los Angeles in Donald Trump’s United States by Christopher Hampton. Reimagined as a French media tycoon residing in California, Orgon is the gullible patriarch who succumbs to the influence of a fraudulent holy man. Paul Anderson, the Peaky Blinders actor who portrayed Tartuffe in a white linen tunic that purposefully concealed the tattoos he had obtained in his previous television life, claimed that Tartuffe, the cunning imposter at the center of the play, turned into an American radical evangelist who was charming, charismatic, and dangerous in the same way that Charles Manson was charming. A White House envoy shows up and compliments a president who “followed this whole incident on Twitter,” updating Molière’s deus ex machina. In the original, a messenger from Louis XIV arrives to resolve everything and the king is lavishly praised.” It wasn’t a subtle parallel. It wasn’t intended to be.

The production’s layers of provocation were openly discussed by director Gérald Garutti. He didn’t pretend otherwise when asked if it was intentional to stage a bilingual play in Britain at a time when the country was lurching toward the EU exit door. He pointed out that Tartuffe has always separated people into those who are more inclined toward openness and those who are more inclined toward withdrawal and insularity. He claimed that Brexit had a stake in that debate. In addition to the Trump parallel, playwright Hampton claimed that the #MeToo movement was fundamental to his thinking. Orgon’s credulity and the household’s readiness to ignore blatant predation fit the cultural moment in multiple ways at once.

The fact that the French cast members showed up for rehearsals demanding that Molière not be touched and ultimately found the update to be genuinely intriguing is noteworthy. Because French and English move differently through a scene, Audrey Fleurot, who plays the seduction scene in what the production called “a siren’s robes,” described the bilingual work as a gymnastic challenge, both linguistically and rhythmically. The actor Sebastian Roché, who portrays Orgon, claimed that even though the audience isn’t aware of it, the change in language produced a distinct rhythm and sound.

The young audiences appeared to grasp that a play written in 1664 about a man who says holy things while doing terrible ones did not require much stretching to fit the current moment, despite the surtitles, language switches, and layered contemporary references. Garutti noted that every era has its share of hypocritical people who preach virtues but are unable to live up to them. The production’s unique brilliance, or its unique audacity, was its insistence that the hypocrisy of 2018 and the hypocrisy of Louis XIV’s Paris were continuous rather than merely analogous, and that the language you use while watching it performed reveals your position.

The negative response from the critics is difficult to ignore. When Molière’s Tartuffe first came out, it was banned because it was criticized by the very people it was mocking. In the past, a play that unnerves the powerful has typically survived the reviews.