Tartuffe (Remixed): Mark Rylance stars in cheerfully scrappy reboot

Amid a month of starry returns to the London stage – Cate Blanchett, Maria Friedman, Tilda Swinton, Sophie Okonedo – the Oscar-winner and great Shakespearean Mark Rylance pitches up in Marylebone as Molière’s duplicitous priest in this cheerfully scrappy reboot.

The script has been reworked by writer/director Darren Raymond, who became friends with Rylance during a drama workshop when he was in prison. Many of the cast are graduates of the charitable training programme and theatre company Intermission Youth that Raymond set up 20 years ago to broaden access to the arts among young people who face social and economic barriers in life, and of which Rylance is patron.

The action has been neatly shifted from aristocratic 1660s Paris to a more or less contemporary society wedding between wealthy Jamaican and Nigerian families. Rylance’s clownish British vicar – with splayed horse’s teeth and an oily three-quarter combover – is the only white character and very much part of a legacy of religious imposition and colonial exploitation.

Initially his stammering, shifty performance – one eyebrow forever jacked up in crafty speculation – is just one component in a broad comic ensemble. But his standout mastery of Raymond’s version of Moliere’s rhyming alexandrine couplets can’t help but turn it into a star turn in the second half.

It is the Nigerian patriarch Oga (Usifu Jalloh) who brings the unctuous and superficially pious Pastor Blake into the nuptial preparations for his daughter Adanna (Sara Mokonen). Her best friend Kemi (a striking Morenike Onajobi) is suspicious but Oga is soon promoting Blake as his preferred son-in-law, over Adanna’s insipid intended, Sinclair (Ivandro Da Cruz Leite).

Grandma (Suzette Llewellyn), the god-fearing mother of Oga’s second wife/Adanna’s stepmum Elmire (a velvety Nakeba Buchanan), entrusts Blake with all her savings. Then, in a farcical scene involving much trouser-dropping, a hot-under-the-dog-collar Blake tries to get his hands on the sumptuous Elmire as well as Oga’s property and fortune.

Moliere mounted Tartuffe in 1664 as a satire on Catholic hypocrisy – the Archbishop of Paris promptly threatened anyone who acted in, watched or even read it with excommunication – but it transposes neatly to devout African and Caribbean families.

Some fun is had at the different approaches to morality of different generations. Not least when a truth drug Kemi prepares for Blake is quaffed instead by Sinclair who starts acting out what he and Adanna have been up to. (Hint: it’s not praying.)

Earlier in the same scene, encouraged by his dad to “out-Nigerian the Nigerians” in religious devotion to win Adanna back, Sinclair spouts cant studded with malapropic references to animals. “It’s clear his faith is thorough,” Blake quips to the audience. “But is it a faith for David Attenborough?”

This is one of the more tortuously awkward rhymes in Raymond’s version, which run the gamut from witty to obvious to completely forced. A larger problem is that while Rylance martials the verse’s rhythms, others allow themselves to be driven by it. (A similar problem afflicted the National Theatre cast of Moliere’s Misanthrope earlier this year.)

A lack of focus in the direction sees some cast members step on each other’s lines and, occasionally, their own costumes. The set, by veteran designer Ultz, is surprisingly basic and worsens the problematic acoustics of this former lecture hall. Raymond could usefully have pruned 20 minutes from the running time.

Yet this remains an enjoyable, knockabout take on a classic. Wiliams, Buchanan and especially Onajobi are good value, and there is a surprising moment of pathos from Christopher Mbaki as Oga’s son D-Miz, till then a wannabe rapper obsessed with food, drink and grooving to bashment. Jalloh and Craig Blake give unsubtle but amusing performances as the two dads, slightly baffled by each other’s culture.

Plus it’s a chance to see Rylance acting with all his comic stops out. Here the mannerisms that have crept into his most recent stage performances fit perfectly with the conniving Blake/Tartuffe. His attempt at a triumphant dancehall move while crooning “Jah Rastafari, me run tings (sic) here!” in mock patois is a moment of superlative cringe.