Tartuffe

“For me, Molière is the ultimate nonconformist, the guy who never stops asking the hard questions, who denounces any attempt to impose the dominant conformism as a substitute to artistic and human forms. His plays are experiments in real time.” In is in these terms that Galin Stoev tackles Tartuffe. A regular collaborator with the Comédie-Française, where he made his debut in 2007 with Spiro Scimone’sLa Festa, then returned with Sweet Revenge and Other Sketches by Hanoch Levin (2008), L’Illusion Comique by Pierre Corneille (2008) and The Game Love and Chance by Marivaux (2011). Tartuffe, for which Molière had to fight hard against the cabals, is the ultimate repertoire play.
Its different stagings have tapped into the things the author left unsaid, the uncertainties about the nature of the character of Tartuffe, in the potential of the dramatic twists, balanced between the mechanics of farce and the exploration of the dark zones of the human subject, lies and hypocrisy. Tartuffe? A true man of piety, a mere crook or the reflection of other people’s vacuity, as Galin Stoev suggests? The mirrors in the set remind the characters of their ambiguities, their little adjustments to the truth: for who is being honest in this family in crisis in which neuroses give rise to fundamentalist fantasies? Remaining in the mode of allegory, an angel all disguised in white sees to it that reason triumphs just as it seemed to have deserted Orgon’s house for good.