Tartuffe at the Malthouse

Barry Otto was kissing Marcus Graham. Which, I thought, was an odd way for adults to make a living. Behind me the kids went “Yuuuckk”. It was the most sensible thing they said all day. The play was advertised as Molière’s Tartuffe, at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre.

The auditorium was cut in two by the stage: a swathe of bright green Astroturf running from one side of the room to the other. Metal gates and grilles stood at either end, and cut into the phony green grass was a long, slim swimming pool. The audience sat facing each other on banks of raked seats looking down, not on Molière’s Paris but the Malthouse’s idea of Toorak: Toorak as seen from South Melbourne, all white fashions, slim bodies and brainless people.

This sort of seating ensures that when an actor turns to address one side of the auditorium the other loses sound and vision. You always feel, when the audio goes off, that the others are getting the best bits. In this production that wasn’t very much.

Matthew Lutton’s direction had more to do with the swimming pool than with hypocrisy and vice. There is an inflexible law of dramatic art, which Lutton demonstrated: when a play stars a swimming pool it will be swum in, fallen into, walked on and peed into. Most of these things will be done twice. The play began with the entrance of a French poodle, Peter Houghton in fat white fluffy pompoms. Acting discomfort, he messed around a bit then peed (as dogs don’t do) into the swimming pool. It isn’t in Larousse but it was a valid comment on what was about to unfold. In case anyone came late the peeing was repeated later.

This Molière’s Tartuffe, as adapted by Louise Fox, was not an adaptation but a remake, in the Hollywood tradition. Something good and foreign was thrown on a table, rewritten and inexpertly castrated—this may explain the poodle and his post-op need to urinate. The ghost of Molière, they say, was seen limping from the Malthouse and asking directions to the local branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead French Playwrights. Unfortunately, he took the play’s wit and satire with him.

After the white poodle came Barry Otto. Otto wore white drag and played Madame Pernelle, Orgon’s mother. He also played Orgon, also in white. Once ageing actors did Shakespeare in touring companies, now they do drag. Orgon’s family and their maid came onstage, also wearing white. When Tartuffe later popped in, he was also wearing white. The play was purgatory but the dry-cleaning bills must have been hell.

Louise Fox wrongly wrote of classical plays that “they’re reignited by the next generation of writers who line up to have a tinker under the hood”. This is what comes of destroying our education system. To take a masterwork from the French canon, change the words and turn it into a nothing-very-much farce, suggests that no one was very clear about what was meant by adaptation. Western culture has become an embarrassing suit of clothes many sizes too large for its present wearers. If Louise Fox got to work under the hood of her own car, and did the should-be-illegal “tinkering” she did to Le Tartuffe, she would find that, like her play, the motor no longer worked.

Le Tartuffe is about a religious charlatan. What happened on stage showed that no one had the slightest interest in the topic, or knowledge of any religion. For them, as for many in the post-religious West, it is self-obvious that Christianity is a synonym for hypocrisy, and nothing more. The weekend before being Tartuffed I was cut off in a supermarket aisle by an enviro-nazi type (thin, intense, looking like a Greens’ senator) steering an aggressive shopping trolley and wearing a designer T-shirt stating “Religion Kills”. I was too scared to argue.

Director Matthew Lutton’s program notes made it clear the play was in uncertain hands: “I grew up in a household that rarely used the word religion. Instead, we talked about spirituality. My grandmother was a theosophist.” Those words are worthy of Joe Orton and may be the funniest lines to have come within twenty metres of an Australian stage so far this year.

The religion that was mocked was an unreal target, an empty container of clichés. Uncertain which form of Christianity was being derided someone, as always, sank to their knees and did a quick Sign of the Cross. During the run of the play the Malthouse advertised a Sunday feature entitled “The God Squad”—“a spirited discussion about the rising influence of religious lobby groups on our parliaments and big business, and how this unholy triad impacts on us all”. Admission $10. Neither the Malthouse play nor the “discussion” were about ideas; both taught and affirmed intellectualocrat prejudice and values.

Seeking to be relevant and contemporary, this Tartuffe was two and a half centuries out of date, even before the poodle piddled. While ineffectually poking at Christianity the production lacked the guts to confront modern hypocrisy. In 1664 Molière defended his play to Louis XIV. Comedy, he asserted, had a duty to correct men as it entertained them, and the ridicule he used to paint his characters was an attack on the vices of his century. To do an indigenous Tartuffe and display the vices of our time the Malthouse playmakers had only to look around. Imagine a play about Professor Tartuffe, the history academic. Or Dr Tartuffe, the Whiteness Studies expert. Or a “stolen generations” Tartuffe. Or Tartuffe the ABC broadcaster. Or Tartuffe the Fairfax opinion-page writer. Or any conference for Business Class Radicals to which the Tartuffes flock. Tartuffe isn’t a family name, it’s a brand name. Unfortunately, the Left takes its modern Tartuffes just as seriously as Orgon took his.

The play was restaged as a farce in which the most dramatic event was the throwing of a cigarette butt into the swimming pool. Seriously. You could feel the sense of horror running through the audience as the actor (Peter Houghton) toyed with the butt before dropping it in. As it was the Malthouse, the cigarettes were advertised in the foyer as being “herbal”. This one was immediately retrieved before threatening the health of any swimmer. Though the program omitted to provide a cast list it did assure audiences that the water “was purchased from a storm water company and will be returned for environmental use at the end of the season”.

Our actors, and audiences, need training in the classical repertoire. The pivotal role of the maid Dorine was played by Rebecca Massey in an impenetrable accent, at first. Valere (Ezekiel Ox) was performed as a Muslim rapper, I don’t know why. When maid and rapper held dialogue the audience needed subtitles, and footnotes. The rapper and Orgon’s daughter Mariane (Laura Brent) were in love and wanted to marry. Though they said so I found this hard to believe. They were characters from different documentaries, playing at different times on different networks—Babe of the Week on Ten and Jihad of the Week on SBS.

Marcus Graham’s Tartuffe was the tanned villain from a US afternoon soap or a thrice-forgettable Australian film. The possibility that his Tartuffe had ever, ever entered a church or that anyone could find him convincing was unimaginable. Released from the discipline of performing a classic Tartuffe, the script and direction pushed the actors into caricatures of caricatures. Molière raised controversy because his comedy-coated barbs struck their targets. This play without purpose used comedy to pass the time and blasphemy to offend.