Mark Williams falls flat in Tartuffe

Tartuffe, at Birmingham Rep, greeted us with a bright cacophony of both set and cast exploding onto the stage. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the play, but I certainly wasn’t expecting a barking grandmother and a loud-mouthed handmaiden wearing Doc Martens. Although a good laugh and good fun, Roxana Silbert’s Tartuffe had me wanting something more, which is a shame considering the stellar cast. Yes, I laughed a lot. But there was nothing stimulating about the play, and Paul Hunter’s Orgon was disappointingly pantomime for me, an actor that has had me in tears of laughter in other theatrical roles.

The title character himself is held off until well into the first act, building tensions and expectations. For a long while our opinions of Tartuffe are developed from the numerous complaints and comments of the other characters. Expecting some bold entrance, Mark Williams’ Tartuffe is instead a surprisingly awkward character onstage before his unveiling (and yes, Mark Williams as in Ron Weasley’s Dad).

Mark Williams as Tartuffe, photo: Ellie Kurtz.

Rather than a calculating villain, Williams performed the conniving fraud of a whole family as an unconvincing religious ‘everyman’, quoting various religious scripts as if by rote, rarely making eye contact with other characters, making it all the more strange that certain characters were so taken with him. What could have been a sly, coy dupe was very different to expectations indeed. Williams developed him as an interestingly broad symbol of religious hypocrisy and the brainwashing effects of religious cults, both referencing the religious context of the original play and appealing to various modern perspectives on 21^st century religions.

Calum Finlay’s performance as Valere, the young romantic son, was fantastic and sadly underused. He should have been utilised far more as one of the best actors on the stage. Absolute chaotic hilarity ensued during his two (far too brief) scenes, which shone out in the play by managing to combine both childlike silliness and humour but with deeper, underlying feeling and meaning. Finlay and Dinit Gohil, who played Valere’s fiancée Mariane, bounced off each other incredibly well, delivering one of the funniest scenes in the entire performance.

Tartuffe knew what it wanted to be and pretended to be nothing else; it was a bawdy comedy, and at that it did well. It was funny, and the actors here knew exactly how to both draw from their own physicality and how to engage the audience (one Warwick student in the audience was at one point bestowed with a boxed ‘engagement ring’). A bundle of puerile silliness it was, but one that didn’t fail to entertain. The contrast of formal dialogue and comedic improvisations followed the play’s 17^th century origins but brought it up-to-date and made it both funny and applicable to today’s audience

And yet, during the second act it deteriorated somewhat into a comedy of clowns. It drew just a little bit too much on cheap jokes and comedic physicality for a play that really is known for its linguistic sophistication and satire that nearly led to the excommunication of its author; the play itself was banned twice. This was somewhat rescued towards the end through thrown-in anachronistic improvisations to appeal to the locals (“It’s times like this you wish there was a High Speed Rail”) and regular, humorous metatheatrical references (“It’s like something in a play”).

These final scenes felt rushed and, although humorous, the sarcastically nationalistic finale that commented on the financial world, surveillance and justice of the 21^st century just didn’t seem to fit. Ultimately, it perhaps fell short of what it could have been and relied too much on cheap humour for it to be a wholly satisfying production. A good night out and a good laugh, but unfortunately it doesn’t go much further than that.