Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

LE TARTUFFE


Directed by Egon Savin

Premiere: ‘Ljuba Tadic’ Stage, 3rd April 2008

Set Designer:

Cast:

Flipote

THE PLAY

Tartuffe is a disease, a collective madness. It spreads from one to another. I didn’t want to make this idea conspicuous in an intrusive way, but rather merely present. Tartuffe becomes Orgon, and Orgon is to become Tartuffe. Anyone or anything can become Tartuffe. He has his incarnations. He can take your biography, your identity; he can even become the object of his own vampirism. Frustrated and cast out, Orgon will attempt to be Tartuffe, to respond to injustice with evil. This is profoundly inhuman and unchristian, whereas the motive for writing this play is profoundly Christian. One can do the most for their faith and their nation by pointing out the immanent evil. This is exactly what Moliere did. He attacked false piousness, hypocrisy. Tartuffe is a set of character traits that can pass from one person to another. Orgon will go from extreme faith to extreme faithlessness. The last thing said in the play is that Orgon no longer believes in people. Extremism is the greatest possible evil to afflict simple, naive and well-meaning people.
Egon Savin

top

ABOUT AUTHOR

MOLIERE

Jean Baptist Poquelin de Moliere was born in Paris in 1622. A prolific writer, Moliere wrote thirty four plays during his less than twenty years as an active playwright. These plays belong to various types and genres of comedy, such as: easy merry plays; plays with music and ballet; comedy of character and comedy of observation etc. The most famous of them are: The Misanthrope, in which Moliere portrays aristocratic circles; The Learned Ladies, a comedy in which the writer ridicules a new form of preciosity: women’s snobbish enthusiasm for science and philosophy; The Miser, a play that portrays  avarice of a bourgeois man and the moral desolateness and decay that this vice causes in the family and society; Tartuffe, a play which at the same time portrays a bourgeois family and a social type: a devout hypocrite; Don Juan, a comedy that touches on the old motive of a seducer and at the same time a satire of religious beliefs, etc. Worn out before his time by illness and misfortune, Moliere died in 1673, relatively young, aged 51.

top

EGON SAVIN

Professor of Directing at Faculty of Drama Arts. He has directed at almost all significant theatres of former Yugoslavia, and his productions toured Nancy, Paris, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Vienna, New York, Chicago. He received numerous awards.
He has worked successfully with all production models present in our country: from the production of Farewell Judas in mid-seventies, gathering together a group of conspiring young actors and forming one of the possible forms of a theatrical off-scene, to productions at institutions of national significance – National Theatre Belgrade, Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica, Macedonian National Theatre.
He has staged the plays by national and international classics with great success, and found in them concrete clues that reveal essential power of theatre in our times and connect both these works and their authors to a concrete space and time.
At Yugoslav Drama Theatre, he has directed the productions of Passion According to Zivojin by Radoslav Pavlovic, Summerfolk by Maxim Gorky, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Forest by A.N. Ostrovsky and It Had To Be So by Branislav Nusic.

top

Reviews

top