Le Tartuffe ou l’Hypocrite

Ivo van Hove is known for his radical stagings of classics, which he has a talent for pushing to their extremes. In his hands, Le Tartuffe ou l'Hypocrite becomes a sulphurous "social experiment", where conservative and progressive forces clash.
Although Ivo van Hove had approached him on two occasions, he had never directed Molière in French until the Comédie-Française, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth, invited him to take on Tartuffe in its original version, the one censored by Louis XIV in 1664. Restored for the first time by historian Georges Forestier, with the complicity of literature professor Isabelle Grellet, it consists of three acts instead of five. Tightened around the Elmire-Tartuffe relationship, it is imbued, in the words of the Flemish director, with "a violent, almost savage force". A hypocrite rather than an impostor, a devotee more out of necessity than out of deceit, Tartuffe is a beggar installed by Orgon and his mother Madame Pernelle in the heart of the family home. Inside, chaos ensues. Cléante, Damis and even the servant Dorine vehemently oppose the patriarch, replaying the eternal conflict between upholders of the established social and religious order, and partisans of individual emancipation.