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

TARTUFFE REMIXED

★★★½

“a captivating story with a real-life conclusion”

Our Public House, finishing its national tour this week at Marylebone Theatre, is very well worth catching as an unusual and highly engaging example of community inspired themes woven into a narrative drama by a professional writer and director.

Dash Arts under the artistic direction of Josephine Burton held speech writing workshops country-wide during which 700 pieces were written by ‘ordinary’ people with something to say. Speech writing workshops are very much part of how 20-year-old Dash Arts brings communities together. Here, writer Barney Norris has taken the workshops’ output to pull together a play with music that is both heartwarming and hard-hitting.

Sanjana, convincingly played by Bharti Patel, has lost her husband. She is trying to keep his late business – a local pub – going but is facing its closure. Her daughter Anika (Chaya Gupta) is developing her own career as a teacher and offers little support but has dropped in for half term. Most of the action is set in the pub – ‘The Albion’. In the background – for now – is a recent failed parliamentary election where so many ballot papers were spoiled that a new candidate – Mary – has been put forward and a new by-election is to be run. Meanwhile the pub regulars drop in for Sanjana’s warmth and support: Scott (Fergus O’Donnell) and Jo (Lauren Moakes). Soon they are joined by the new Labour candidate (played by Gabriella Leon) and her party worker Tom (Kit Esuruoso). They are keen to sit with their potential constituents and find out what matters to this community.

It’s all there and this is a cleverly woven piece – a coat of many colours. Mary is deaf (all dialogue is captioned and sign language is used extensively). Jo is out of jail, living on her mother’s sofa, and desperate to recover her child now in foster care despite her drink problem. Tom is suitably realistic about the value of listening to people’s concerns without the power to act. There are revelations, despair, fun and lots of love.

Surprisingly missing, as has been pointed out during the tour, are the influences created by the rise of the far right in these communities. But this could easily have been too much to assimilate. The second act brings onstage members of the non-professional community, presumably invited in from the workshops, to fill out the cast and deliver two ‘real’ speeches. Every performance celebrates different people and their different speeches. Last night one dwelt on the need to rehumanise society, the other on homelessness. There was an element of singing in these speeches with the pub visitors present joining.

What started as an evening where the creative process was potentially going to be of most interest, ended as a captivating story with a real-life conclusion. There was neither soap nor sentimentality here and the voices, if difficult to listen to, rang true.

Tag Archives: Marylebone Theatre

TARTUFFE REMIXED

★★★★★

Marylebone Theatre

TARTUFFE REMIXED

Marylebone Theatre

★★★★★

“an evening of powerful, enriching theatre”