“One of the marks of great plays,” says Christopher Hampton, “is that there’s always something in them that speaks to any era.”
The playwright has proved his point by relocating a 17th-century French drama to the United States of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. Tartuffe is a moral comedy by Molière, in which a religious hypocrite tricks and seduces himself into the household of a wealthy man. Hampton has made Orgon a French movie producer who buys a Hollywood studio, and dropped in some lines about the inappropriate sexual behaviour of movie moguls.
“There’s certainly – at the very heart of the play – sexual harassment, big-time,” he says.
Molière was Hampton’s special subject when he studied modern languages at university, and has played a large part in his playwriting life. His reputation was made by The Philanthropist (1970), an English response to Molière’s The Misanthrope, and this is the second time he has translated Tartuffe.
“It was the greatest success of Molière’s life,” says Hampton, “and remains the most performed French classical play.”
There’s a coincidental double bill in Britain this year, with an RSC version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto (set in Birmingham’s Muslim community) opening at Stratford-upon-Avon in September. “I assume it’s because hypocrisy is always with us,” says Hampton.
“Hypocrisy and religion – it always rings a bell,” agrees Audrey Fleurot, the French actor known to British audiences from her role in the police drama Spiral, who is making her UK stage acting debut as Elmire, a wife targeted by the sleazy preacher. The word “tartuffe”, Fleurot points out, has entered the French language to mean a hypocrite or imposter.
After its original French premiere, Tartuffe was twice banned for perceived anti-Catholicism, and its challenge to religious values is the hardest part of the drama to reproduce these days, when few theatregoers would be shocked even if the venal priest came on dressed as the pope.
“That’s right,” says Hampton. “Only if you did the play in Iran would you have stakes as high as they were in 17th-century France. In Molière’s day, people were still being burned at the stake. The reason I set it in America is that they do still take religion very seriously. And the idea of someone coming out of the desert, as it were, in California and being charismatic and taken up by rich people is much easier to accommodate.”
Another problem for modern stagings is the bizarre ending, in which a messenger suddenly arrives from Louis XIV, and, through a speech larded with compliments to the monarch, resolves the plot.
“Molière had to add that part,” says Fleurot. “The play had been banned twice, this was the third version he tried. He added it to flatter the king. So what do you do with this speech that is really nothing to do with the play?”
For Hampton, there was only one solution: “When you think about who would be the equivalent deus ex machina in modern America, it has to be Trump. So what happens at the end of the play is that an envoy from the White House arrives.”
In order to keep the translation faithful, Hampton felt that the new conclusion should echo the tone of Molière’s “arse-licking speech” about his Royal patron. So the ambassador from Washington now hymns “a great president, whom no impostor’s cunning can mislead, who’s followed this whole incident on Twitter”.
The translator says he will be intrigued to see how a London audience likely to be predominantly Trump-sceptic will deal with this, but argues: “Molière was fantastically subversive. The speech is so over the top that I think it was written tongue in cheek.”
Fleurot approves of the substitution: “Trump is a Tartuffe, he really is. And yet he became president!”
Audiences experiencing this cheeky rewrite are likely to contain a significant number of French ex-pats or tourists, as this is believed to be the first bilingual production of Tartuffe in the West End. A cast of French and English actors will speak their own languages (and sometimes each other’s) with each section surtitled. The conceit is that Orgon’s family speak French with each other but English to the Americans they encounter in Los Angeles.
“I think it works out at about 50% English and 50% French,” Hampton says. “It starts pretty much all in French and then, by the end, is almost all English, which appealed to me as a soundscape.”
Fleurot is relieved that she decided, two years ago, “to start taking English lessons again. Because there’s more and more possibility, especially because of Netflix, of co-production.” The decision paid off when she was cast in Safe, an English-language drama set in Manchester that was recently released on Netflix..
As a screen actor (in movies such as The Intouchables as well as TV work), she has a particular interest in the post-Weinstein spin of the Tartuffe script, although her position on #MeToo is nuanced: “In every revolution, there’s always excess, and heads fall, so I think there’s good stuff and bad stuff. People discovered it’s more complicated to be a woman than a man? Big news! I’m very happy that these issues became a talking point. But I’m also, like: look, when you’re a woman, you have to deal with harassment, aggression every day. We talk about it being bad in movies, but it’s probably as bad, worse, in, say, the post office. Actors only have to work with people for weeks, months, but in other businesses, you can put up with harassment for years and in constant fear of losing your job for complaining.”
She suggests that women in the film business must be permanently on guard: “If I were a man, I could call some director and say I loved their work and would like to meet them and talk about working with them. You can’t do that as an actress because of the fear of it being misunderstood.”
Another unfairness to women is a double standard on ageing. “There are male actors who have started a great career at 50 because they are suddenly noticed. How many actresses would that happen to? Women are under such pressure to look young. I have heard that, in Hollywood now, they have to get English actresses to play the grandma because there are no American actresses who look that age any more.”
The rule in the Tartuffe rehearsal room is that the director speaks English, which is also the language of small-talk between the actors in order to help the French performers perfect their second language. Everyone involved is aware that a cross-channel theatrical collaboration has a political resonance at this time.
“I like to think of it as my protest against Brexit,” says Hampton. “Although nothing of that nature is touched on in the text, I’m very excited by the idea of English and French actors on the same stage, talking two languages. It feels like the direction we ought to be going in, rather than the direction we are going in.”
Fleurot sees the bilingual role as a “half-step” towards acting fully in English next time; perhaps Shakespeare or a new play. It seems inevitable, though, that Brexit will make it harder for EU actors to get work permits.
“Yes,” says Hampton. “So maybe the first bilingual Molière production in the West End will also be the last.”
- Tartuffe is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 28 July.
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