A Schooling in Surveillance

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TARTUFFE by Moliere; Translated by Richard Wilbur

One measure of great literature is its capacity to serve as a mirror, allowing each interpreter to see his own concerns reflected. By that standard, Rumanian Director Lucian Pintilie's vision of Tartuffe--a portrait of an absurdist, spy-flecked totalitarian state--is not only legitimate but a tribute to the hardihood of Moliere's 17th century satire of conformity and misplaced religious fervor. Pintilie's production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will not please purists: it is manic rather than mannered, it looks abstract and austere rather than luxuriously "in period," and it ingeniously takes liberties with the plot without altering the text.

Yet the laughs it gets are Moliere's laughs.

The random frenzy with which justice is dispensed at its end seems no more arbitrary than Moliere's happy ending. And Pintilie's humor, like Moliere's, is noisy, naughty and spiritedly physical.

TartufFe is the alias of a trickster who poses as a selfless holy man; he induces a pious bourgeois to part with his money, his house, his daughter's hand in marriage and, ultimately, his most dangerous possession, a cache of incriminating documents left by a friend who has fled into exile. In his infatuation with Tartuffe, the good, decent Orgon alienates almost every member of his household; yet when ruin strikes, they rally loyally to him. The crucial question for every production is whether Orgon (a role Moliere himself played) deserves this fidelity. Is TartufFe an obvious rogue and Orgon therefore a buffoon who should know better? Or does Tartuffe maintain at least a hint of plausible sincerity? The latter approach enhances the play's tragic and cautionary dimensions; the former affords broader comedy and a villain to hiss at.

Pintilie opts for farce and melodrama.

As directed by him, Gerry Bamman's Or gon is pompous, adenoidal, often petulantly childish; he reveres Tartuffe in or der to assert his moral superiority over a family that has grown fractious. Harris Yulin's Tartuffe is cold and cobra-like, vengeful and vain. He has a genuine element of fervor: he endures ritual flogging, dispenses alms, even appears to heal the halt and lame. But there is nothing inspirational in him and nothing ennobling in his impact. In the opening scenes, the actors appear in clownish whiteface and lurch like robots. The playing reaches its tenderest pitch at an utterly perverse moment: Harriet Harris, as Orgon's wife, fakes lust for Tartuffe so as to reveal his perfidy to her husband, throbbing with an emotion that we never see Orgon arouse in her. The play's visual imagery is equally extreme. At the moment the lights go up on the institutional white, bricklike walls, geometrically marked floors and scattered cushions that are to pass for a Paris mansion, a basket is overturned, and the stage is suddenly bestrewn with red apples, which reappear throughout the show as tokens of temptation or insignia of passion. At the end, Tartuffe arrives to claim Orgon's fortune in a 1930s gangster-style roadster that literally bursts through the back wall of the set. His face is scarred; his henchmen wear fedoras; his manservant (Peter Francis-James), who in Pintilie's most inspired invention turns out to have been spying for the King all along, guns him down.

Merging the characters of the manservant and the King's messenger converts the monarch from a protector to a tyrant who will let his citizens suffer to increase their awe and dependence. The change derives from a genuine insight: as Pintilie notes in the program, the play is full of instances of people being spied upon, or believing that they are. Perhaps it takes an East European, schooled in the ways of the surveillance state, to grasp the political implications of that conventional element of farce. But for spectators in the American Midwest, the climactic revelation is perceptibly, persuasively chilling. --By William A. Henry III