Tartuffe – a horny, slippery dipper…

Dartington Playgoers are in rehearsal for their next performance .

Following the sell out success of Jerusalem, where the outlaw Rooster Byron was a kind of Pied Piper for the village youth, the troupe is presenting ….

…

                                TARTUFFE:  “….A born again, horny  slippery dipper, a two faced shyster, a smarmy old letch…”

Director Patrick Cooper says:

“Moliere was brilliant at getting under people’s skin, and his portrait of a fake holy man worming his way into the heart of a bourgeois family did just that:  banned immediately by the Archbishop of Paris, with the threat of excommunication for even reading it.  It was the king himself, Moliere’s patron  Louis XIV, who came to the rescue,  and the play has lived on ever since, one of the most loved and performed of all French plays.  (It’s also very funny!)”

While the church no longer holds the sway it did even a generation ago, there are still plenty of fake ‘gurus’ peddling their spirituality for profit.  Some of them bear an uncanny resemblance to Tartuffe.  In its essence,  this playful, sometimes dark, satire on  human folly, feels timeless.

ROGER MCGOUGH, brilliant Liverpool poet, has brought the play to contemporary  life with a sparkling rhymed translation that keeps close (but not too close) to Moliere’s original.

Performances run from 27th to the 30th November.

We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do. Further details and ticket links are here.