Lucie Tiberghien, artistic director of Molière in the Park, has scored a coup—an English-language world premiere of Tartuffe that uses Moliere’s uncensored version as its basis. Tiberghien’s production is the first English rendering to draw on a restoration of the original text by Georges Forestier that played in 2022 at the Comédie Française.
Tartuffe
Directors of Shakespeare’s plays often feel the need to goose them a bit with extraneous business, and the results can be highly variable. Yet directors tamper far less often with, say, Aeschylus, Shaw, Ibsen or Molière. It’s a bit of a surprise, therefore, to find that Craig Smith has chosen to inject a good deal of invented business into Molière’s 1669 classic Tartuffe, and that, for the most part, it works rather well.