Namastaaaaaaaaaaaaaay….

We’re all familiar by now with preshow announcements about cellphones and smartphones, right? After last Wednesday night’s performance of the National Theatre‘s very, very wonderful adaptation/revival of Tartuffe, I have a new pet hate: smart watches. The lady sitting to my left was wearing one, and while it didn’t make a noise it lit up every time she received a notification – and when I say ‘lit up’, I mean the kind of light you’d use to guide an Airbus onto a runway. It clearly hadn’t occurred to her that the light from her device might be distracting, but then I suppose to her, it’s her world, and everybody else just happens to live in it too. I’m sure these watches are wonderful things – but please, if you’re going to the theatre, take it off, stick it in your pocket, shove it up your arse, leave it at home, or find SOME way of not imposing the light pollution from your snazzy new toy on your fellow audience members. Leave the light show in the auditorium to the lighting designer.

If you’re lucky enough NOT to find yourself sitting next to Ms. Fuck-The-Rest-Of-The-Audience-I’m-Not-Taking-My-Watch-Off, you’ll have a great time – at least, if you manage to get to one of the last two performances, because the last night is on Tuesday. John Donnelly’s script is more a contemporary riff on Molière than a direct translation of him, and it’s none the worse for that – it means the production can hit a slew of topical targets (Brexit, new-age spirituality, political corruption, police violence, and many more) without the references feeling forced. Donnelly’s script is fast, funny, and very clever – I bought a copy on my way out of the theatre, and it reads as well as it plays – and so is Blanche McIntyre’s production. It takes place very firmly in the present, and very firmly in England – Highgate, to be precise, which allows Donnelly to skewer a richly deserving, spectacularly insular/up-itself tranche of affluent North London (and make a splendidly snide but absolutely on-the-nose joke about Archway, which is icing on the cake). There’s a not-very-subtle and richly-deserved swipe at people who made money out of the 2016 referendum by short-selling the pound, Robert Jones’s living-room set has great fun with the ridiculousness of what interior design magazines pass off as expensive good taste, and McIntyre and her cast keep things moving at an impressive clip.

And sorry, but I’m now going to have to take a week off and build some kind of shrine to Olivia Williams. My fault, the only thing I remembered seeing her in before this is Dollhouse, I had no idea she had such extraordinary comic timing. Her Elmire – Orgon’s second wife (I mean, do I really have to give a synopsis of Tartuffe?) – is the funniest thing in a pricelessly funny production, and the funniest comedic performance I’ve seen in a long while. She shoots one-liners like arrows from a bow, throws herself all over the stage during some spectacular physical business, and manages to be many times larger than life without ever sacrificing the character’s essential emotional truth (yes that’s a wanky phrase, deal with it). She gets huge laughs, but she gets them by being believably real, even when she’s doing something utterly ridiculous (watch what happens – oh wait, you can’t unless you go tomorrow or Tuesday – when she forces Orgon into a concealed compartment in a coffee table so that he can eavesdrop on her when she’s “alone” with Tartuffe).

There should probably be some kind of shrine built to everyone else in the production, but Ms. Williams’s performance was the biggest surprise. Denis O’Hare goes for broke in the title role, and it pays off; his pronounced-but-indefinable somewhere-in-Europe accent can make the word ‘namaste’ sound like a devastating put-down, the sequence in which he washes himself (yes, including down there) with ice-cubes out of a champagne bucket is indecently funny, and he somehow manages to make his Tartuffe into a ruthless opportunist and a genuinely plausible guru (he tells Orgon he’s “never pretended to be anything I’m not”, and you believe him). Kevin Doyle’s Orgon is clearly capable of being a ruthless opportunist – it’s implied he made his fortune by using inside information to play the markets against his own government – and he’s clearly (chastely) besotted with Tartuffe to a degree that stops him seeing Tartuffe’s machinations until it’s far too late, but there’s a sweet sadness to him too, and his search for some kind of redemption for business transactions he describes as “treason” is quite touching.

There are sharp comic turns, too, from Kathy Keira Clarke as all-seeing, all-knowing housekeeper Dorine, from Kitty Archer as Orgon’s spoilt-brat-with-a-backbone daughter Mariane, from Enyi Okoronkwo as Mariane’s nice-but-dim brother Damis, and from Geoffrey Lumb as Mariane’s boyfriend Valere, reinvented by Donnelly as a socialist street poet who believes rhyme is an insult to the Revolution. Everyone manages to negotiate a sharp shift in tone in the final scene – there’s a lot more blood visible than you’d usually expect in a production of Tartuffe – and the shift in tone works well; this is essentially a contemporary play based on Molière rather than an English translation of Molière’s words, and Donnelly has a definite point about inequality and injustice in modern Britain, and (in that final scene, after Tartuffe is arrested) about the way this country treats foreigners, but he makes his points without driving them home with a sledgehammer: this is a pitch-perfect production of a funny, funny script, and if I lived closer to London I’d be back tomorrow night to see it again before the end of the run.