It was great.
That was my inital thought.. but i learnt so much from this experience! Seeing Tartuffe at the Malthouse made me aware of so many Theatre aspects that I had previously not known about, or paid little attention to. This was a modern adaptation of the class Moliere’s play, it was in a modern setting (in Melbourne,) and completely recontextualised to suit this day and age. Characters were redefined, their costumes were.. amazing. So symbolic of their status and provided allusions to innocence (perhaps even naivety,) and gave the idea of teh characters being ‘pure’ to some extent. The lighting was something that caught my attention as well. Before seeing this I had never really thought about how important lighting is in influencing the mood of the scene, and setting the atmosphere. It also aided the transformations of a character, and further emphasised the relgious connotations that were undoubtably embedded in the text.
The set:
You can’t go past this when talking about this production of Tartuffe!
The traverse (which was sloped,) the different levels, the trapdoors on the traverse, the pool, the use of a completely different staging area at the end of the play, the way in which the traverse created a distinctively unique actor-audience relationship. This is only a brief blog about what I learnt from this.. because I don’t have all day (especially because its now night..), but I feel that Tartuffe so heavily influenced my passion for Theatre. It showed me what can be done with any script, how modern subject matter and comedy can be added into the most classical of scripts. I began to understand many theatrical conventions, and it sparked especially my interest in the design aspects of Theatre (being costume, makeup, set, lighting (don’t know much about that though..) and anything else that was to do with being creative around theatre!)
I’ll probably add to this recount of what happened but if you didn’t see it.. then you missed out!
Julia's IB Theatre Journal 