TARTUFFE REMIXED
Marylebone Theatre
★★★★★
“an evening of powerful, enriching theatre”
The extended family have gathered for a wedding. Pastor Blake (Mark Rylance) arrives to save a household that was managing perfectly well without him.
Usifu Jalloh’s Oga is the pious patriarch and a generous host. His daughter Adanna (Sara Mokonen) is engaged to Sinclair (Ivandro Da Cruz Leite), a nice young man who is in love with her. In an Iago-like move, Pastor Blake plants a seed of doubt in Oga’s mind about Sinclair’s faithfulness both to God and to Adanna. Oga responds by promising his daughter to the pastor instead. However, Pastor Blake has designs not just on Oga’s second wife Elmire (Nakeba Buchanan), but also on the family money.
Adaptor and director Darren Raymond writes in rhyming couplets, laced with spoken word and punctuated by Duramaney Kamara’s sound design and score. The rewriting of Molière’s script in Tartuffe Remixed reveals that Pastor Blake’s power is verbal. He weaponises his education and authority to make the family doubt one another.
This is a study in how the patriarchy weakens the tribe by imposing the paterfamilias’s blind spots on others, instead of combining everyone’s strengths. Oga loves his daughter Adanna. Yet he hands her on as though her life is merely his game of pass the parcel.
Molière’s original farce breaks through into this production when the groom’s father Delroy (Craig Blake) attempts to unveil the pastor’s fraud. This doesn’t go according to plan.
Morenike Onajobi’s Kemi is Adanna’s oldest friend. She’s been onto Pastor Blake from the beginning but hasn’t the status to intervene. Suzette Llewellyn’s Grandma and Blanche Williams’s Great-Grandma are convincing Afro-Caribbean elders. Christopher Mbaki’s D-Miz brings a noisy charm.
Raymond is Artistic Director of Intermission Youth. Most of this cast came up through it, with two of the charity’s graduates joining the company in rotation through the run. Rylance is a founding trustee. This superb show is what that investment produces.
ULTZ gives Oga a mansion worth stealing (though on the night I saw it, a light flickered distractingly, and I could not tell whether that was deliberate). The wedding clothes by Shola Ajayi (with Maybelle Laye as associate costume designer) were perfect, not straying beyond the stylish, tasteful side of flamboyant.
Molière was denied a church burial by the institution he satirised. By the end of this show, you can see why. Although entirely predictable, the denouement is the most moving ten minutes of theatre I have seen this year. The family returns to their faith, without any corrupt and corrupting mediator. The women have untangled the knotty problem, re-jigging the tribal power structure. In the end, the extended family submits not just to their Creator but to the higher purposes of strength, unity and peace within the tribe.
Full marks, all round. This is an evening of powerful, enriching theatre that restores one’s faith in humanity.
TARTUFFE REMIXED
Marylebone Theatre
Reviewed on 11th September 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Mark Senior
