Tartuffe Tickets

Tartuffe? Isn’t that French potato dish? No, that’s tartiflette – and it’s delicious. Tartuffe, while also delicious (in a different way), is a play byJean-Baptiste Poquelin. No-one really knows Jean-Baptiste by his real name, instead we call him by his stage name – Molière. A famous one-named chap? He’s basically the precursor to Madonna, or Cher!

I know Molière! Big name, loads of famous plays… What are they again? Well, there’s The Miser – that was last on the West End last year and starred Griff Rhys Jones, Lee Mack and Matthew Horne. There’s also The Misanthrope and The Bourgeois Gentleman.

So, Tartuffe… Do I need to know French? No in fact. Christopher Hampton has adapted the play numerous times and this latest one will be London’s first dual language West End show! So, it will play in a mixture of French with English surtitles, and English with French surtitles. Basically, you can understand it and learn French at the same time. Take that Rosetta Stone!

An updated play – sound exciting! What’s it about? Well, Hampton has moved this play forward from 17^th century France to modern day Hollywood. Orgon is now a French media tycoon, determined to make his mark on Tinseltown and make his presence known in the upper echelons. But then he meets Tartuffe, a radical American evangelist and everything starts to fall apart. No surprises that Tartuffe drives a wedge between Orgon and his family, friends, even his business empire!

That Tartuffe sounds like a piece of work! Who’s in the show? Well, we don’t know just yet. What we do know is that it’s playing at Theatre Royal Haymarket from 25 May 2018 and is directed by Gerald Garutti, who used to be dramaturg at the French National Theatre. We guess he knows a thing or two about Molière!

It’s adapted by Hampton, who last wrote an adaptation of Tartuffe back in 1983 for the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Barbican. It starred Antony Sher, Alison Steadman and Mark Rylance. Hampton is pretty incredible at this sort of work too – he’s best know for Les Liaisons Dangereuses on stage and for Atonement on screen. Oh, and he co-wrote the book and lyrics for Sunset Boulevard too. So, a pretty big deal.