Tartuffe (Remixed) review – Mark Rylance sinks his false teeth into Molière’s trickster comedy

Marylebone theatre, London
Darren Raymond’s update drops Rylance’s impostor into a Jamaican-Nigerian wedding, with clever rhyming couplets but less political sting

Spitting posh platitudes through false teeth so bucked they might enforce a liquid diet, raking one hand across an oily comb-over while the other holds a Bible as tight as a manbag stuffed with gold, Mark Rylance extends the long English tradition of comedy vicars to a French source: Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe, about a trickster who fakes piety to defraud a devout family.

The original targeted the Catholic church, the arrows sharp enough that the archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication to any Catholic who saw the play, forcing Molière to write a new version, The Impostor, where the fakery was less directly sacred.