Comedies that are 400 years old and French don’t always age that well. Adding a comedy vicar with false teeth helps a bit, but doesn’t entirely save this Moliere remix.
Director and adapter Darren Raymond has put a decent spin on the 1664 comedy about faith, following in the vein of his similar remixes of Shakespeare plays in order to open classics up to new audiences.
Here, a priest pretending piety one again inveigles his way into a devout family whose young scions are about to marry — and fleeces them. But Raymond adds a thick extra layer which deals with the culture clash of a Jamaican and a Nigerian family coming together in marriage.
Raymond has fun with the idea, especially with two comedy crotchety grandmas whose disdain for the young and their wayward ways raises a few laughs, and he gets at some interesting stuff about faith. But it’s a slow trudge through two and a half hours of enervating rhyming couplets (as in the original) which seem frequently to trip up a few of the cast members.
Craig Blake as Delroy and Nakeba Buchanan as Elmire the wronged wife hold the stage enjoyably, while Morenike Onajobi as the bride’s best friend Kemi brings bolshiness and adds touches of humour beyond just the gags in her lines.
Then, sticking out like a seventies variety act is Mark Rylance as the rooking priest Pastor Blake. His performance is false teeth forward, all salivary, with comically raised eyebrows directed at the audience. He pulls on all the tricks that made him great at the Globe: full acknowledgement of the crowd, playing up to us entirely. It’s wonderful to watch, but seems plucked from a different production.
The play’s caution about blind faith and how it justifies weird things without the possibility of challenge still holds very well. Problem is, it’s one of those plays where you have to endure the long drawn out and easily solvable consequences of miscommunication, and where characters do things that make no sense in order to keep the plot going a bit longer.
In Raymond’s take you can see Pastor Blake as a vestige of a parochial and rapacious white England which swindles and steals from black communities. You can also just enjoy the false teeth. Whichever, the stage comes alive with Rylance on it – who wouldn’t want to watch him try to seduce a baffled woman while waddling around the stage with his trousers down? – and without him diminishes into shouty arguments about belief which are too constrained by the simple rhyme scheme to really find any power.
