Tartuffe

Moliere’s classic satire tells the story of Orgon, a wealthy businessman, who takes in a brilliant scam artist, Tartuffe, who is pretending to be a religious wise man out to steal his wealth and sleep with his wife. Ignoring his entire family’s pleas, Orgon simply won’t see that Tartuffe is a fraud. As Orgon tries to marry off his daughter to Tartuffe, rather than to the young suitor she’s in love with, his wife Elmira and his maid Dorine combine to save the family from ruin and show Tartuffe up for the scoundrel he is.

Cast

Archana Patel Nandi (Madame Pernelle), Ashish Pore (Damis), Harish Kulkarni (Orgon), Heena Sharma (Dorine), Manraj Singh Sarma (Cleante), Rahul Valmiki (Valere), Sambhaji Sasane (Tartuffe), Samridhi Dewan (Marianne), Saudamini Kalra (Elmira)

Creative Team

Daniel Goldman (Director), Nidhi Bisht (Dramaturg)

I had a lot of fun working on this Tartuffe in Hindi, though it was much harder than I was expecting. I’d recently directed the Merry Wives of Windsor in Swahili and I’d found Swahili to be a language that was pretty easy to navigate. This was much more complicated, simply because my ear was less attuned to the syntax of Hindi and the fact that we started the process without a translator on board. Fortunately, we quickly worked out that nine different actors writing nine different characters was always going to be messy and we brought in the wonderful Nidhi Bisht to help us out and she really helped tie things together.

Mostly though, it was a huge pleasure and an honour to work at Drama School Mumbai under the stewardship of my dear friend Jehan Manekshaw, and alongside Ben Samuels who was making a wonderfully funny production of Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in the room next door.