Screwing with the Text

Tartuffe...
Tartuffe...

Where do I even begin?

It was definitely not like how I imagined it when I first read the play.

But then again, when the set is a moving box that revolves standing up and everybody is just flying everywhere, then you know you are not in for the typical, 17th-century depiction.

While the play had its comedic moments, this take on Tartuffe was not comedy. It was a lot darker in just...everything really. I'm still so hooked on the fact that Tartuffe was portrayed as this cult-like, not-Antichrist-but-some-form-of-alternative-Jesus-like-figure rockstar (he had the long hair, and at some point he was posed as if he were crucified)...which was something I could bet Moliere did not imagine Tartuffe to be such a character.

Michael Thalheimer also decided to include an alternative ending; he ends the play right when the bailiff comes in and evicts Orgon and his family. It is also implied in the end that Elmire leaves Orgon for Tartuffe.

We've seen a lot of performances here in Berlin--especially at Schaubuhne--that do not stick to the text one hundred percent. In Ostermeier's Hamlet, Ostermeier included a lot of modern-day profanity and fourth wall-breaking. He also moved the "To be" speech to the beginning, took out the first scene with the guards and the ghost of Hamlet's father, and replaced it with the king's funeral. In Death in Venice, half of the story was not even said--it was basically performed as an interpretive dance. Additionally, Ostermeier had the actors stop halfway through to reevaluate the direction of the performance. Now with Tartuffe, we see "screwing the play" in a whole new level--the characters look like they came out of a Tim Burton movie, psalms are inserted into the performance, and the ending had been completely changed.

As someone who has done playwriting more than anything else, I feel like I should be insulted. Someone put so much effort into creating a piece for you to use...and all of a sudden you decided to do a one-eighty and change things drastically. I wouldn't mind you, as the director, adding some lines or changing some things to illuminate the scenes and the emotion behind said scenes, but don't do anything besides that. Anything beyond that is not my work.

No, it is still your work. The text they used was your text after all. But let's be real--nobody is obligated to stick to the playwright's work word by word. If that were the case, our experiences would be exactly the same every time we go see different productions of the same play.

There's something beautiful about giving directors and other theater makers that freedom though. You learn something about the piece that you never thought of before; you see it in a completely different light.

<personal story>

My director for Cabaret Theatre's Original Play Festival changed a lot of what I had originally written in my play for the festival. There was a lot that had been cut out in terms of the text (but that was actually for time constraint purposes so...). Instead of having the set be a little girl's room, she had only five chairs onstage. Instead of having my main character shout in anger in the last monologue, she made her cry and had the other actresses go and hug her. These were things that I never intended, but because I gave my director the freedom to do as she thought fit, I experienced my own work in a new light and gained something from it. I remember listening to the conversations my director would have with the actresses (each actress represented my main character at a different point in her life), and just hearing about what they thought about the character...they each brought something to my attention that I would have never thought of before.

I felt a certain way that I had never felt even when I was writing the show.

</personal story>

You can't get that sort of enlightening experience if you have a stick up your butt about text--whether it means adding more to the text, adjusting certain scenes, changing the set/setting contrary to the play's original idea, etc.

And just as I learned something from my director's take of my piece, I got something from each of the shows we have seen at Schaubuhne because these directors were daring enough to change things around. I saw the characters that I have been familiar with since high school in ways that I did not know were possible.