DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
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Theatre Review: Tartuffe
Cheap laughs blunt Moliere's razor-sharp comedy on bourgeois hypocrisy
Doing their best: The Tartuffe cast
[Manuel Harlan] 
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Tartuffe
National Theatre
London SE1
THE essence of Moliere’s Tartuffe is the pillorying of hypocritical religious piety and the gullibility of a bourgeois family desperately seeking to give an ethical dimension to its vacuous life.
First performed in 1664, it certainly can and perhaps should be adapted to lend it contemporary relevance, but its core has to remain. This was well demonstrated in the all-black version, with the setting transferred to Atlanta, Georgia, at the Tricycle Theatre a few years ago.
But the National, in trying to adapt this 300-year-old galleon and giving it a contemporary make-over, leaves the structure creaking and cracking.
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