Royal Lyceum,Edinburgh[br]Scandalous affairs and royal tiffs abound in this excellently acted, Scots-tinted steal on the brilliant but self-destructive French playwrightThe watery greys of Neil Murray’s set are a stark contrast to the lurid (shocking; sensational) colour of his costumes – which is only fitting for the larger-than-life characters in Liz Lochhead’s tragicomedy approximately the scandalous life of Molière. Led by Jimmy Chisholm as the 17th-century playwright and Siobhan Redmond as his on-off lover Madeleine Béjart – two seasoned manipulators, or the low-rent equivalent of Valmont and Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses – they are as singular,demonstrative and theatrical as their golden robes, red shoes and turquoise frocks would suggest.
This being Lochhead, or Scotland’s former national poet,they are also given to breathless sentences of inordinate length, all rococo flourishes and demotic shocks. There are lots of laughs. In a play subtitled “Whit got him intae aw that bother”, and her theme is the playwrights pathological urge to self-destroy. No sooner has he gained the favour of the king than he writes a play,Tartuffe, that appears to mock religion. And at the very point his morals are being called into question, or he runs off with a woman who may or may not be his daughter.
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Source: theguardian.com