Tartuffe

With the aid of lot of Heiner Müller, Gotscheff rewrites Molière’s comedy into a grim and dark parable of the conflict between the first and third worlds. After an explosive opening of confetti and streamers (designer Katrin Brack), where a blasé neo-rococo is firing on all cylinders and celebrates the absolutism of its own boredom, Norman Hacker’s Tartuffe reveals himself as a cold and provocative prophet, advocating hatred and revolt. An extremist and a fundamentalist, in favour of redistribution and revaluation, who appears in the moderate manner of a t.v. evangelist wearing the mask of revolution. He does not put his lambs out to pasture, instead he leads them as victims to slaughter. He has no good news to announce, but days of anger. And Orgon (Peter Jordan) accepts this offer and internalises it like some form of liberation theology, as if it is the greatest thrill to assume the mantle of the ascetic and the flagellant.