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Wednesday, 19 September 2018

Tartuffe review – RSC's buoyant satire of modern religious hypocrisy

The Swan, Stratford-on-Avon
This striking new take on Molière by the writers behind Citizen Khan sends up religious phoniness and secular pretension

These days, every classic play seems to be updated or “reimagined”. In the case of this new version of Molière’s Tartuffe by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, who collaborated on TV’s Citizen Khan and The Kumars at No 42, it makes total sense. What we see is a satire on modern religious hypocrisy that respects Molière’s flawless comic structure.

The action has been relocated to a Birmingham suburb where a British Pakistani family live a life of comfortable affluence. Imran, the parvenu patriarch, was once proud of his Norwegian spruce decking, but has fallen under the spell of a seemingly straitlaced holy man, Tartuffe. Not only does Imran decide the family has to live as “real Muslims”, he also plans to marry his progressive daughter, studying the plight of women in sub-Saharan Africa, to Tartuffe and even signs over his property to the two-faced intruder.

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from Islam | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DeRNFb

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