The Hypocrite by Molière, adapted by Justin Fleming, directed by Peter Evans. Designed by Stephen Curtis, lighting by Matt Scott, music by Ian McDonald. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre until December 13. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Melbourne this year has felt like a little outpost of France. There have been no less than three main stage productions of Molière’s plays, including two of Tartuffe. This new version at the MTC, adapted by Justin Fleming as The Hypocrite, follows a rambunctiously vulgar adaptation presented earlier this year by the Malthouse Theatre.


It’s easy to see the appeal of Molière’s unforgiving satires of human folly and greed, and in particular why Tartuffe – about a conman masquerading as an evangelist – should strike a chord. In our time religion is a locus of deep anxiety, and the gap between language and action in public life has become an almost unbridgeable abyss.

Like the Malthouse production, this new version is contemporised, but its 17th century antecedents are stamped on the design and performances and, with less felicity, onto the script.

There are many things to like about Peter Evans’s direction, which features a stripped down and deeply theatrical elegance. Stephen’s Curtis’s set emphasises its own artifice and his absurd costumes unite frou-frou opulence with contemporary simplicity.

Evans has gathered a cast with depth as well as breadth. Garry McDonald plays the hapless Orgon, who falls under the spell of the charlatan holy man Tartuffe (Kim Gyngell), sacrificing his family and property before realising that Tartuffe is a greedy, lustful weasel (dressed rather unsettlingly like a ‘60s intellectual) who has worked out that he can do what he likes as long as he cloaks his actions in pious intentions.

The first 10 minutes, with Kerry Walker in full flight as Madame Pernelle, are very promising. But for all its fine elements, the production ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

The major problem is Fleming’s script. Most puzzlingly, it makes Orgon’s family innocent victims of Tartuffe’s nefarious strategies, rather than themselves ambiguous objects of satire. This blunts its comedy and transforms Molière’s play into a straight defence of bourgeois values.

The language occasionally achieves a balance between colloquial and literary, and when it does, it works beautifully. But more often it’s staid, with a stitled vernacular featuring rather too much forced and clunky rhyme (varied, apparently, between quatrains and couplets, but all with the same punishing rhythm).

To sustain rhyming couplets for any length of time in English – a language with very few rhyming words – requires the linguistic dazzle of a Byron. Fleming is simply not that inventive. In his hands, Molière almost becomes earnest, which is new indeed.

This review was published in yesterday's Australian.

Picture: publicity shot for The Hypocrite: Marina Prior, Kim Gyngell and Garry McDonald.

So many people I respect, privately and online, have differed with me on my review of Tartuffe (closing this Saturday at the Malthouse) that I went along to a matinee today to check if I had been hallucinating. Or - a much more depressing possibility - to see if somehow my responses had been in bad faith.

To my relief, I enjoyed it just as much on a second viewing. It's wicked, vulgar, intelligent fun: a production that reminds you that Molière and company forged their success by simultaneously entertaining the unwashed commoners and the slightly less unwashed aristocracy. And I still think that it by no means traduces or reduces the play: all Molière's ideas, all his pointed social satire, are gloriously there.

As an aside, I watched it with a boisterous audience of school students, who laughed and clapped all the way through and at the end sounded as if they had been at a rock concert. Now, that's encouraging.

Tartuffe by Molière, adapted by Louise Fox, directed by Matthew Lutton. Companion artist Neil Armfield. Set and costumes by Anna Tregloan, lighting by Paul Jackson, composer Peter Farnan. With Laura Brent, Marcus Graham, Francis Greenslade, Peter Houghton, Rebecca Massey, Barry Otto, Ezekiel Ox, Luke Ryan and Alison Whyte. Malthouse Theatre until March 8. Bookings: (03) 9685 5111.

A minor puzzle of 2008 is that, as if we are suddenly a small outpost of France, Melbourne’s two major companies are hosting three plays by Molière, including two productions of Tartuffe. It remains to be seen if this is too much of a good thing. But the sizzling adaptation of Tartuffe now on at the Malthouse demonstrates that Molière’s joyously wicked satire remains as apt now as it was four centuries ago.


Molière’s comedy is founded on the gloss of human appearances, on the slippery gaps between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. In his own time, his relentless satirical attacks on the hypocrisies and vulgarities of the elite made his plays immensely popular, and also caused them to be banned for offending against religion.

It is moot whether Molière's defence - that rather than attacking religion itself, his plays were truly pious in attacking those who adopted the trappings of piety without the substance - holds true or is a little disingenuous. Certainly, in this version he is presented as the uncensored atheist he might have been if the mores of the time had permitted such frankness.

Without a whiff of deadening reverence, Louise Fox’s adaptation sticks closely to the spirit and structure of the original play. The action is transposed to a garishly imagined version of contemporary Toorak, where the wealthy patriarch Orgon (Barry Otto), after narrowly surviving a heart attack, has been born again under the insidious influence of the charismatic charlatan Tartuffe.

Tartuffe (Marcus Graham) is an evangelist Christian in the mode of Tom Cruise – handsome, cut (we get plenty of opportunities to admire his torso) and deeply creepy. And beneath his slickly pious exterior beats the heart of a conman. Having gained Orgon’s unwavering trust, Tartuffe ruthlessly exploits his position, causing havoc in Orgon’s dismayed family. He attempts to seduce Orgon’s wife Elmira (Alison Whyte), gains power of attorney over his fortune and is promised in marriage to his daughter Mariane (Laura Brent).

Fox’s version, written in robustly colloquial rhyming verse, finds contemporary equivalents for Molière’s targets, and makes merciless fun of Melbourne’s suburban mores, from Toorak to Werribee. Her biggest departure from the text is a boldly blasphemous reworking of Molière’s original deux ex machina ending. In the hands of Peter Houghton, here given a touch of divine amplification, it's a theatrical coup.

Despite his absence due to illness, the production still bears the mark of Michael Kantor's fascination with rough theatre, and it's hard to disentangle Matthew Lutton's directorial vision from Kantor's. It's certainly directed with a lot of vim. Just as Molière fused the vulgar theatre of his day – farce and commedia dell’arte - with literary drama, Lutton’s production weaves together the conventions of traditional French farce and contemporary popular culture. The result is feisty and very Australian, drawing on local traditions of clowning and physical theatre that date back to the Australian Performing Group. It’s rude, crude and vulgar, animated by a lively intelligence.

And again like Molière’s play, it doesn’t make a lot of sense so much as a lot of pointed nonsense. Orgon’s family – shallow, narcissistic, materialistic and selfish – lounge around the pool in their gated mansion in white bathers and sunnies, presenting a series of immediately recognisable social “types” that are contemporary equivalents of the stock characters of commedia dell'arte.

Alison Whyte is Elmire, Orgon’s second wife, the blonde, toned, spoilt socialite; her daughter Mariane (Laura Brent) is a not very bright innocent with the hint of an eating disorder, and the son (Luke Ryan) is an inarticulate, violent private schoolboy who is no good at school but excellent at rowing. Francis Greenslade is Cleante, Orgon's brother, a Toorak Buddhist who is one of the two oases of common sense in the play, while the other is provided by the voluble Dorine (Rebecca Massey) as the Russian maid. Mariane’s fiance Valere (Ezekiel Ox) is a Lebanese homeboy who hangs out at the local mosque when he’s not (presumably) doing wheelies in his doof-doof Valiant.

At the centre of the action is Barry Otto’s performance as Orgon, an exquisitely poised balancing act between genuine poignancy and vulnerability and self-interested blindness, folly, selfishness and greed. He plays both Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle, which necessitates at one point, in a comic highlight, a phone conversation with himself. It’s a truly virtuosic performance.

Anna Tregloan’s set is designed in traverse, with a narrow stage running through the centre of the theatre that features a stylised pool and dayglo turf. It gives the audience the opportunity to study one another across the stage, perhaps leading to further reflections about Molière’s observations of human folly. And the action is heightened by a mishmash of popular music, courtesy of a lively score from former Boom Crash Opera soundman Peter Farnan.

It’s a high energy, irresistibly funny production. And perhaps as close as we can get to the vitality and contemporary bite that Molière’s work had when it was first produced.

Picture: publicity shot for Tartuffe featuring Marcus Graham and Barry Otto.

A shorter version of this review appears in today's Australian.

Don Juan in Soho by Patrick Marber, directed by Peter Evans. Set and costumes by Fiona Crombie, lighting by Matt Scott, sound by David Franzke. With Craig Annis, Angus Cerini, Daniel Frederiksen, Katie-Jean Harding, Bob Hornery, Kate Jenkinson, Bert Labonte, Christen O’Leary, James Saunders and Dan Wyllie. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until February 16. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Patrick Marber’s contemporary treatment of the tale of Don Juan is only the latest of something like 1700 versions (and counting) of the legend of the serial seducer. One of the most famous is Molière’s, which premiered in Paris in 1665. It was considered so scandalous it was hurriedly withdrawn after 15 performances. The principle outrage was religious: Molière’s critics accused him of “attacking the interests of Heaven” and of insulting the King.


It’s easy to see why: Don Juan is as attractive as he is reprehensible, a defiant individualist and libertine whose perverse honesty (or corrosive cynicism, depending how you look at it) exposes the hypocrisies of those who condemn him. “The profession of hypocrisy has wonderful advantages,” says Molière’s Don Juan. “All the other vices of mankind are opened to censure, and everyone is at liberty to attack them boldly; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice which closes the mouth of everyone.”

Hypocrisy is Marber’s principal target, but he also takes aim at the vacuous narcissism of celebrity culture. This contemporary Don Juan looks at celebrity chefs, footballers and bloggers spilling their inner anguish across the tabloid minds of a gossip-hungry world, and will have none of it: he prefers the bestial but honest itch of desire above the tawdry confessional. “'We live in an ‘age of apology",” says Marber’s DJ. “Don't confuse it with authenticity.”

Marber has written a robustly contemporary and yet surprisingly faithful adaptation of Molière’s original, complete with the avenging statue (this one of fellow libertine Charles II) that mysteriously drives Don Juan to his eventual doom. Marber even restores some punch to the scene considered most scandalous in the 17th century, in which DJ bribes a beggar in an attempt to make him blaspheme against God. Only in this version, it’s a Muslim beggar.

Marber’s DJ (Dan Wyllie) is, as his appalled sidekick Stan (Daniel Frederiksen) says, “Satan in a suit from Saville Row”, who has “declared a jihad against the human spirit”. At the beginning of the play he has just fled his recent marriage to the saintly Oxfam worker Elvira (Katie-Jean Harding), whose charms, after two years of dogged pursuit, have vanished with her conquest.

DJ is a monstrous, infantile egotist, supremely uncaring of the wreckage he leaves in his wake as he pursues his desires. His brazenness leads to some brilliantly filthy moments of stage comedy. But perhaps what is most enjoyable about this text is its playfully heightened language, which is unashamedly rich and theatrical.

Director Peter Evans takes his cue from the excesses of Marber’s writing, and gives Don Juan in Soho an equally heightened production, on a stripped-down stage that exposes the mechanics of the theatre. The action is played out fluidly before a series of flats, with photographic backgrounds that can be stripped away to create another scene.

The performances, which grew on me as the evening progressed, make no attempt at realism. Wyllie’s aristocratic DJ is your classic theatrical cad, magnified to absurd proportions. Daniel Frederiksen as Stan, as exploited and charmed as any of DJ’s women, struggles miserably with his own greed: while he longs for a conventional life, he can’t resist the crumbs that fall from the Earl’s table.

These two central roles are supported by some lively performances, though the cast’s accents tend to be a bit wonky. Katie-Jean Harding, a recent VCA graduate with an eye-catching quality of luminosity, manages the difficult task of giving emotional weight to Elvira’s attempts to save DJ’s moral soul. But what is also clear is that, for all his blatant caddishness, DJ has woken her own sexual passions: her motives for wanting him back are as lustful as DJ’s own. And there are some fine cameos, in particular, Christen O’Leary as one of his brief conquests from the tower blocks, seduced before the appalled eyes of her boyfriend Pete (Bert Labonte).

It’s a nonsensical fantasy, perhaps especially in the visions of crowds of satisfied women fainting in DJ’s wake, which wouldn’t be out of place in email spam for Viagra. The danger of such artifice is that the heartlessness of its protagonist can lead to a concomitant indifference in the audience. Evans avoids this by gradually stripping the stage back to its walls, destroying all theatrical illusion, in an effective mimesis of DJ’s moral emptiness.

DJ’s grisly death at the hand of Elvira’s brothers is surprisingly horrifying and poignant. Marber lacks the metaphorical power of religion – no flames of eternal hellfire greet DJ, despite his supernatural hallucinations. Instead, his fate is existential barrenness, a wastrel life that amounts to a tawdry and vengeful murder; yet it's difficult not to admire his defiant refusal to apologise. His only epilogue is the hapless Stan mourning his unpaid wages. But thankfully, there’s no neat moral bow at the end. Like Molière, Marber leaves any moralising up to his audience.

Picture: Dan Wyllie (front) and Daniel Frederiksen in Don Juan in Soho. Photo: Jeff Busby

A shorter version of this review appeared in Thursday’s Australian.