Tartuffe, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, review: A dual-language, modern updating does not fulfil its promise

Christopher Hampton’s French and English production is relocated to Trump’s America, but the setting rarely resonates

Paul Anderson and Audrey Fleurot in 'Tartuffe' (Helen Maybanks)

This account of Molière’s great black comedy claims to be the West End’s “first dual-language production”, alternating between French with English surtitles and English with French surtitles. Christopher Hampton – whose works include a version of the play for the RSC which translates Molière’s rhyming couplets into English blank verse – was given the brief of making the bilingual idea work, with the further requirement that the director, Gerald Garutti, wanted to present the play in a wholly contemporary setting.

So here the proceedings are transported to Donald Trump’s US. Orgon (Sebastian Roché) becomes a French media tycoon who has relocated his family in Los Angeles where he has fallen under the spell of Tartuffe, a radical American evangelist. Peaky Blinders star, Paul Anderson, plays this pseudo-guru, as a seductive infiltrator in his loose-fitting, oddly Middle Eastern clothes – a fashion soon religiously copied by his devout follower.

Roché nicely captures the dazed, giddy preposterousness of Orgon’s almost sexual infatuation. The director insists in the programme that Tartuffe is not merely an imposter but a fundamentalist fanatic. Anderson, though, doesn’t sufficiently project that dangerous glint of self-deceived certainty that we associate with the species, nor the inordinate appetite. The play’s fanatic is surely Orgon.

A skilful cast – who include Claude Perron, amusingly forthright as the maid, Dorine, and George Blagden, the fiercely disgruntled son, Damis – negotiate the shifting between languages with flair, though it still feels as if the situation has been contrived primarily to suit the dual-language imperative rather than to serve the play.

A huge perspex box trundles backwards and forwards on Andrew D Edwards’ set, containing a cube that can give us glimpses of “offstage” rooms, or a different part of the onstage room. As Orgon’s much-abused wife Elmire, Audrey Fleurot is a model of elegant intelligence, who proves to her spouse that Tartuffe has lascivious desires on her in a claustrophobic scene set in that cube. It emphasises the horror of the near-rape more than the broad farce of the original, where Orgon hears the noisy truth while hidden under the table.

I wish that Hampton had given us a complete Trump-era makeover of the play. I would be interested to see if it would cope with the fact that that evangelical Christianity seems prepared to forgive Trump for any of his scandals, sexual or otherwise. Hypocrisy seems to have been deconstructed out of existence in our post-truth world.

As it is, the updating is mostly confined to tweaks here – until the final 10 minutes when there’s a sudden avalanche of Trump. Molière’s play, originally banned, famously had to wait five years to be licensed for public performance by the King. I think that Hampton is right in seeing the fulsome flattery of the monarch in the Officer’s speech at the end as “actually criticism in the form of praise”, as he has commented.

So it is here, with an 11th-hour bombardment of disingenuous praise for the “presidential pardons” and loyalty to “America First”, with references to everything from “grabbed pussy” to twitter followers and the need to post a grateful tweet online quick. With the family planning a trip to Mar-a-Lago as another Tartuffe ominously arises, this could be called a case of too much, too late.

An evening that does not fulfil its promise – hélas, alas.

Until 28 July (trh.co.uk)