Tartuffe oder das Schwein der Weisen (Tartuffe)

Jury Statement

Every era has its own hypocrisies – and the con-artists that it deserves. In Molière’s play, the wealthy bourgeois Orgon fell under the spell of religious pietist Tartuffe and terrorised his entire household with his mania. Author and pop musician PeterLicht transforms these two characters into the pig-costume wearing sex guru “Tüffi” and his biggest fan “Orgi”, who plies him with the offer of his own wife and daughter. PeterLicht’s dialogues imitate fan logic: In vertiginous cascades of wittering, they revolve around individual signal words (“hot/not hot”, “contextualise”, “workshop” etc.) until their very meaning collapses. Claudia Bauer’s world premiere production pulls off the feat of translating PeterLicht’s critique of the ethics of language into feisty and yet sophisticated humour: Decked out in pseudo-Baroque pop-outfits and Disney-wigs, the fabulous Basel company presents their know-it-alls and players on both sides of a house façade. The world is a hoax, or maybe it’s just phony – and they play along with all the creativity they can muster.