Shakespeare company takes on Moliere with Tartuffe
Posted May 21, 2026 2:38 pm.
The Shakespeare Company is taking a little detour into French classic comedy with a production of Tartuffe by Moliere.
While going with a new playwright is a step out of the Shakespeare Company’s usual lane, it makes sense to Artistic Director Richard Beaune, who would like to expand offerings to include more classics in the future.
“I’m starting with French because I’m French, but I would love to bring in classics from other cultures, other languages and have new translations and adaptations of other works from around the world.”
Besides the bard, Moliere is right up there with the most famous playwrights; he is often referred to as the French Shakespeare. And Beaune says that although the script is over 360 years old, it’s still timely, citing the Off-Broadway production of Tartuffe last month starring Matthew Broderick.
Tartuffe, or the hypocrite, is about a man who purports to be rather pious but is obviously anything but. Obviously, anyway, to everyone except the family the fraudster is trying to hoodwink.
Beaune says Moliere writes circumstantial satire, “It’s people listening in, people being hidden. It’s those sorts of things inside of this really sharp satire. So it’s a really, really cool blending of different types, different kinds of comedy.”
He says the production at the Shakespeare Company takes that historical silliness and sets it in the 1970’s, where the dichotomy between hypocrisy, reality, truth, and ego can really take flight.
“That’s what I wanted for Tartuffe. wanted something that was like really, that felt rock and roll, has all of the heart, the soul, earthiness of that, but is absolutely ridiculous and utterly brilliant at the same time.”
Part of the challenge of staging a comedy originally written in another language, though, is the language itself. To that end, Beaune decided to translate the original script himself to produce a completely fresh adaptation. He experimented with writing in a more contemporary prose, but also in a rhyming couplet style more in keeping with the traditional rhythmic way Moliere wrote.
He took both to a test reading, “within a minute of hearing the actors read it, everyone knew this had to be written in rhyming couplets because it just lifts it into a really ridiculous place. So I wrote the whole thing in rhyming couplets.”
He says part of the fun is embracing the silly and artificiality to find the truth in the comedy, “which is that humans sometimes very stupidly believe something that they should know is not real.”
Tartuffe produced by the Shakespeare Company runs at Vertigo Studio Theatre from May 21 to June 6.
Tickets are available here.
