The Literati

Justin Fleming has a knack for this.  For the Australian stage, he’s translated and masterfully adapted Moliere’s Tartuffe and The School for Wives, and here reworks Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes. 

Directed by Griffin’s Lee Lewis, it’s a co-production with the Bell Shakespeare Company, with five powering performances delightfully squeezed onto the modest Griffin stage.

Christopher (Jamie Oxenbould) is a decent husband dominated by his wife, author and intellectual snob, Philomena, (Carolin Brazier) and their daughter, the also literary if sexually frustrated Amanda (Kate Mulvaney).   

As for their younger daughter, the charmingly unpretentious Juliet (Miranda Tapsell), Christopher wants her betrothed to the well-matched Clinton (Oxenbould), but Philomena wants Juliet wed to her own poetic guru Tristan Tosser (Gareth Davies).  Brazier also plays a visiting academic doctor, here recast as female, who helps this mad household see true love and reason.

Re-titling it as The Literati, Fleming relishes Moliere’s satire on literary pretention and the great truth, as well said in Sydney as in 17^th Century Paris, that a learned fool is more of a fool than an ignorant one.  Sharpening the attack is Fleming’s witty reforging of Moliere’s couplets into light rhyming patterns which are artful and yet rich with idiomatic in-jokes.

Quick character changes and negotiating the ever turning revolve on Sophie Fletcher’s elegant living room set more good fodder for humour: the Griffin is a nicely sized home for this sort of meta-theatre fun.  

Mulvaney sets the pitch perfectly as the tight, high bound Amanda and Davies is odiously languid as the deceitful Tosser.  But Oxenbould, Crozier and Tapsell also shine in their fast doubling through less hyperbolic roles. The Literati is an hilarious agile production, bristling with language play, which miraculously always stays true and on track.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud