STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Theatre Review: Tartuffe
Cheap laughs blunt Moliere's razor-sharp comedy on bourgeois hypocrisy
Doing their best: The Tartuffe cast
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
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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