A stage floor strewn with party balloons lends the pre-show period of this new adaptation of Molière’s 1664 satire a pleasing anticipatory quiver. Something is gonna pop.

And sure enough, several things – including some of the balloons – do just that.

Will Thomas and Annie Byron in Tartuffe. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Translating Molière’s ancien régime into something more in tune with contemporary Australia and its undeserving rich, adaptor-director Phillip James Rouse stays more or less true to the original though here, the gullible heir to a fortune is now a no-less-unworldly heiress, Orgonelle, now in thrall to Tartuffe, a cheesecloth-draped wellness guru with eyes on her money. 

Prompted into action by an extended family determined to hold on to its unearned privileges, Orgonelle’s long estranged sister Elmire enters the fray with a plan to expose Tartuffe for the fraud he is.

We don’t see much Molière in Australia and it’s been more than a decade since I last encountered Tartuffe – in a Bell Shakespeare production built around Justin Fleming’s dazzling rhyming-couplet translation. Rouse, by contrast, opts for tart prose, its tone set immediately and memorably by Orgonelle’s mother, Madame Pernelle, who’s on the doorstep of cognitive decline and a veritable fountain of vulgarity.

Lucy Miller and Deborah Galanos in Tartuffe. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Orgonelle (Deborah Galanos) seems no less detached from reality, bobbling around the mansion and bursting balloons for stress relief. She has little time for daughter Marianne (Dominique Purdue), son Damis (Travis Howard) and Damis’s boyfriend Valère (Will Thomas). Meanwhile, the showily costumed Dorinne (Tamara Lee Bailey) – supposedly a maid and probably the dead patriarch’s plaything – watches warily from the sidelines, alert to the possibility that she might suddenly find herself homeless as well as unemployed.

Rouse’s pacy script bristles with rat-tat-tat repartee and barbed cruelties and but his production tends toward overstatement in performing it. The energy is relentlessly high, and the volume rarely drops enough to allow the comedy to breathe. Shrillness sets in, and in a theatre this intimate, some may find themselves shrivelling a little.

What nuance there is comes largely from a funny and magnetically vulnerable Galanos. Beneath Orgonelle’s entitled battiness is a grieving, lonely woman – hence her susceptibility to the blandishments of Julian Garner’s linen-smooth, shirt-open-to-the-diaphragm Tartuffe.

Lucy Miller is as sharp as a caltrop as Elmire. Dominique Purdue (Marianne), Travis Howard (Damis) and Will Thomas (Damis’s boyfriend Valère) make for an entertainingly floppy trio of Gen Z tropes. 

It’s a light-footprint production in terms of set but Anna Gardiner’s costumes are eye-catching, deftly mixing period-inflected silhouettes with the kind of dollar-bin chic this part of Sydney’s Broadway strip specialises in – though where she found Tartuffe’s underwear is anyone’s guess.

Tartuffe plays at KXT on Broadway, Sydney until 17 October.