Tartuffe

Although the head of a rich bourgeois family where the blasé youth are treading their own sentimental paths, Orgon, the central tragicomical character of the play, is no match for the complex intergeneration situation. On a random Sunday he meets a supposedly impoverished country aristocrat who entraps him with his moral uprightness. The aristocrat is called Tartuffe and doesn’t have a penny to his name, so Orgon offers him a roof and some material comfort, while in return, Tartuffe with his catholic strictness is to control the moral standards and behaviour in the house. Orgon and his aged mother, Madame Pernelle, blindly trust Tartuffe’s authority, but all the other members of the family immediately sense something calculating in his zeal. Things go very far: it looks like Orgon will give his daughter to Tartuffe as a wife, while at the same time the hypocritical guest is drooling around his host’s wife Elmire. When this is revealed and even Orgon’s eyes see, it is too late, because he’s already signed all his assets over to Tartuffe. The hypocrite is thus holding all the cards and the fate of the family is at his mercy.
In the seventeenth century, France was a site of a veritable war of morals between the reformist Jansenists and the conservative Jesuites, who were supported by the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. Its members had great influence in the society and liked to self-righteously interfere with the lives of bourgeois families in order to prevent any potential »moral debauchery« in them. Even the King himself could do nothing against them, because they explicitly referred to the Christian values – although at the same time they breached them quite openly. Molière exposed them in Tartuffe and a parallel process took place: the influential members of the society managed to get Tartuffe banned for several years, despite the fact that even the king laughed unreservedly at its first performance in Paris. The staging of this classical text by the great comediographer in a translation by Primož Vitez and directed by Vito Taufer try to place the story into the context of our time and the unbearable lightness of manipulation we are facing in everyday life.