A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes (Tricycle, Kilburn)

It’s unusually bracing to take a dip in the mere of Molière, even if Indhu Rubasingham‘s noisy, hot-gospelling production of Marcus Gardley‘s loosely rhyming, very free adaptation of Tartuffe takes some suitably diabolical liberties; this is, after all, the devil’s work incarnate in the title character’s religious hypocrisy and corruption.

The wolf, Molière’s oleaginous Tartuffe, is re-named Tito Toof, a preacher and part-time masseur in the American Deep South. He needs to infiltrate the Georgia mansion of a fried chicken and funeral parlour chain tycoon (more fried chicken they eat, more funerals he’s got) called Organdy – for Molière’s Orgon – in order to feather his own nest and save his church from bankruptcy.

Three hundred and fifty years on, the play has lost none of its power or pertinence. But Gardley’s Tartuffe – as played with dynamic fervour and malevolence by Lucian Msamati, this year’s RSC Iago – is not an insinuating fraud already embedded in Orgon’s household but an upfront libidinous evangelist whom we see seducing a girl who’s been trampled on by Newcastle soccer fans (in Texas?). The laying on of hands is the tactic of a charlatan and a dirty old man.

He’s then hired by Organdy’s fire-breathing mother (Angela Wynter) who believes the world is going to hell in a fruit-basket. He also has, in this version, a wife, the magnificent Sharon D Clarke who doubles as lead singer in the choir and scourge of licentiousness. You feel Gardley has at last found the play he really wants to write when this so-called First Lady faces off with Organdy’s gold-digging Jezebel, Adjoa Andoh's Peaches, an exotic dancer who rejoices not in the Lord but in the earthquake of her thighs.

Having cut loose from the arch formality of Molière, and his classical structure, Gardley feels free to elaborate other themes of his own, such as the fluid identity of Organdy’s children – Ayesha Antoine‘s hippie prodigal Africa and Karl Queensborough’s goofy Gumper who wants to be an airline stewardess – and the resentful participation of a Mexican housemaid (Michelle Bonnard).

The show is a riot but a slightly messy one as the crude farcical acting is insufficiently controlled to make the comic points land with real force. The great scene where Toof is unmasked in seducing Organdy’s fiancée while the duped cuckold cowers under a table is prepared far less dangerously than in Molière (where Orgon’s wife, a model of propriety, is the agent of revelation) and executed as slapstick, not seduction.

Msamati’s snakeskin boots and shiny suit bespeak the familiar image of this type of contemporary huckster, and he’s such a fine actor he allows the glimpse of a possibility that he’s in the grip of a sex addiction he can’t control. Molière is nothing if not moral, but this unapologetic romp changes the ending in the most outrageous and, fair enough, frightening way to catch the mood of our callous and cynical carry-on in public life and conduct.

A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes runs 14 Nov