Here’s a brand new family comedy as combustively alive with wit, fun and insight as it was when first performed in 1664.For that the credit must go to the great French playwright Molière (1622-73) and to his posthumous partners: radical and ingenious re-writers, Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto and director, Iqbal Khan.
People fret about the resetting of plays but this one is about hypocrisy, and therefore transferable into any and every human society. Not least the one chosen: modern Pakistani Birmingham, where Tartuffe the con-man turned holy man fills his boots via the religious guilt of wealthy Moslems.
Guilt has certainly conquered Imran the rich head of the Pervaiz household, or rather Tartuffe – his ‘Angel’- has. Nothing is too good for this saint, not his house, his business, the disowning of his son, or the hand of his daughter. Everyone else greets the situation with varying degrees of cynicism, as Tartuffe gradually tightens his grip, only for retribution to come via a gloriously modern twist.
Success has tamed the Pervaizes. They have become so angliicised that they tidy up the house before the cleaner comes. A wild opening dance to the ever apt music of Sarah Sayeed suggests subdued passions. Unsubdued and unsatisfiable however is Grandma (Amina Zia), whose tongue lacerates everyone for betraying her slanted, fantasy of the past.
Zainab Hasan wins sympathy as the undergraduate daughter, with all the right sociological terminology to describe family power relationships, but little resistance to Dad’s marriage ‘shortlist of one,’ cleric. Raj Bajaj plays her would be cool, club-going brother with much bombast, real feeling and humorous insecurity.
As the second wife, still not fully accepted by the family, Sasha Behar brings a view from a glamorous and worldly previous existence. She attracts Tartuffe’s unwelcome attentions, and in a hilarious prolonged scene encourages them, so that her concealed husband overhears. But, the fraudster always has a new angle.
The Koran becomes a shifting sand of twisted meaning when Tartuffe cynically debates with an English Moslem convert, a pedantic family friend (James Clyde). There’s tougher meat in a Bosnian cleaner, with Michelle Bonnard delivering blasts of caustic soda truth about all and sundry, including chapter and verse on Moslem female dress. A speech about female honour being hijacked by male pride drew protracted applause. Hers was a bravura performance that made you wish she was hoovering into every scene.
As the deluded head of the family Simon Nagra makes a fine transformation from saved sinner, holy and benign – as long as not crossed, to angry but very deflated ordinary soul.
The target of the play is decidedly not religion itself, but people who abuse it for personal gain. And in the title role Asif Khan, all half-metre beard, mock humility and rolling R’s eloquence here’s a Tartuffe fit for the era in which truth died, to be resurrected in whatever fake news version is needed. Ever confident that nothing can touch him for long, his only irritation is that confidence trickery is no longer sufficient in itself. He’s had to become a media jihadi in order to gain sufficient attention!
★★★★☆ Derek Briggs 110th October 2018
