Tag: Mark Rylance

Tartuffe Remixed

September 17, 2026

I played the part of Tartuffe myself in 1974 (it was of course a school production). At the smallish Marylebone Theatre they have a new version starring Mark Rylance as ‘Pastor Blake’.

The action is transferred to the eve of a wedding between a West Indian boy and a Nigerian girl. Just as in the original, a dodgy cleric wins over the father to such an extent that he hands over his entire property and even attempts to make his daughter marry the Pastor instead of his beloved. Darren Raymond’s script is clever and funny (in rhyming couplets, too!) and the cast deliver it with gusto. Lots of laughs, though a Jamaican would no doubt pick up a few cultural references I missed. So an entertaining production, and the obvious point of two black families being exploited by the only white member of the cast is not laboured too much.

Both of the slight flaws are inherited from the original. It’s hard to believe in the Molière that Tartuffe could really talk the father round so completely in the teeth of all common sense. Here Rylance plays Blake as a wonderfully seedy priest, hugely entertaining but surely even less appealing? The other problem is the ending. The French version is perhaps the most shameless case of a deus ex machina: the King just turns up and annuls Tartuffe’s triumph with a wave of his hand. How does a modern version deal with this? Raymond hasn’t really got an answer. But it’s a lot of fun.

Dr Semmelweis

July 19, 2023

This play, starring and partly written by Mark Rylance, tells the story of how Dr Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that fatal puerperal fever could be almost eliminated just by getting doctors to wash their hands. This radical innovation was not accepted by the profession (and the play makes clear that Semmelweis was, well, somewhat lacking in diplomacy, which didn’t help) and the doctor himself, whose behaviour became increasingly unacceptable, died in a lunatic asylum.

It’s a great production, which includes a group of women who play violins and dance around or with the actors. That sounds weird, but it mostly works, only seeming intrusive a couple of times.

It seems odd now that the simple notion of bacterial infection should have been so difficult to grasp. Part of the problem was that Semmelweis had only sketchy, inaccurate ideas about the mechanism: he just knew, and demonstrated, that washing worked. Sadly it was a long time before the practice was universally accepted.