Tartuffe is no Turkish delight

Moliere's satirical farce, which aims its shafts at religious and sexual hypocrisy, is pertinently updated by the young director Serdar Bilis. The production is transported from Molière's 17th century France to contemporary Turkey and Islam.

At a time when Turkey wonders whether its future lies with the European Union or a more religious-orientated society in the East, Bilis's Turkish version ought to give fresh resonance to Molière's fusty classic.

The play seems unpersuasive in its reiterative spinning of the idea that religious piety serves as a disguise for sexual opportunism and amorality.

Yet although Bilis's production is decked out in Turkish decor by designer Jon Bausor and Ranjit Bolt's elegant, rhyming-couplets translation is updated and slanted, this Tartuffe lacks a strong Turkish or Muslim feel to it. When prayer mats are used for either prayer or exercise it seems as if this Turkey does not take religion too seriously.

Directors need to decide whether to emphasise the play's comic elements or draw it into farcical terrain. Bilis's production tries unsuccessfully to exist in both worlds. It is, though, the weakness of key performances that militate against success.

Tartuffe, who worms his way into the household, financial resources and smitten affections of middle-aged family-man Orgon, is a villain of infinite resourcefulness. John Webber's stooping, obsequious Tartuffe offers an unfunny caricature of religious fanaticism camouflaging wickedness.

Speaking in a plaintive, monotonous whine and little more, Webber's Tartuffe ostentatiously parades his devoutness. Offered the unwilling hand in marriage of Orgon's daughter (Esther Adams), he tries instead for Orgon's young wife, Ermine, played by a blandly anonymous Lara Agar-Stoby and ends up comprehensively exposed. Yet in either guise he remains very much the same.

These days, Orgon's obsessive commitment to Tartuffe would best be explained as a case of late-onset homosexuality. Instead, Tony Taylor makes an Orgon whose obstinacy raises few laughs. Only a final, smart reference to buying political favours with a cheque to party funds and Phil Cheadle's bemused, accusatory brotherinlaw Cleante hit the right notes.

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Tartuffe