Aiming To Have The Audience Clutching Their Bellies With Laughter

Basing Bell Shakespeare and Griffin Theatre Company co-production The Literati off Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes might have ended in farce off stage, if it were not helmed by Justin Fleming, the playwright who successfully adapted Moliere's Tartuffe for Bell Shakespeare in 2014. Actor and writer Kate Mulvany speaks glowingly of working with Fleming, having also appeared in Tartuffe. "The Tartuffe text was so cheeky, still so relevant brought into modern times that when Literati ended up in front of me I was already kind of like 'Oh God I hope they offer me this role, or some sort of role in this.'

"It's Moliere, but more than anything it's Justin Fleming, who himself is an extraordinary, funny, absolutely unique human being. Physically he looks like he's from the 16th century."

"[When adapting a work for the stage] you always get an element of the playwright, so the great thing about The Literati is yes, it's Moliere, but more than anything it's Justin Fleming, who himself is an extraordinary, funny, absolutely unique human being. Physically he looks like he's from the 16th century. He's a very gracious and generous playwright and that's all there in his writing. We're presenting a Moliere, but more than anything we're presenting a brand new Australian play, and that's the joy of adaptations is you can still get the voice of the adaptor in there, especially when the play is a couple of hundred years old. It's nice to get a fresh take on it, and that's what Justin brings to it."

But how does one make a 17th century French farce into a reflection of modern Australia? "The Literati is about pretension basically," Mulvany begins. "It's almost like those book clubs where only the smartest people are allowed in the room kind of thing and what happens when a fraud gets into that room. So that's really I think relevant for today. [Fleming] kind of modernises the vernacular, he puts [it] into the Australian way of speaking, from all social classes of Australia. It's not like you're coming along to see a bit of French farce. You're coming to see a brand new Australian play that has taken its seed of inspiration from the Frenchman Moliere. So it's still farcical, it's still high comedy, it's still heightened, but it's very recognisable as Australian culture and Australian society."

What the actors - Mulvany, Caroline Brazier, Gareth Davies, Jamie Oxenbould and Miranda Tapsell, performing under the assured hand of Griffin Theatre Artistic Director Lee Lewis - bring to the production are their "funny bones": "Luckily we all have very good funny bones... At the moment [in the second week of rehearsals] it's just a bit of a love fest and everybody just making each other crack up.

"The most important thing with any Moliere is that it's just funny. Of course there's a deeper story under it, but more than anything it's just a really fucking good night in the theatre. It's very funny, and you can take from it what you want: you can take everything or you can take nothing, and our job as an actor is just to find every moment, make every moment work, make the story ring true, but also just make sure that people go out just clutching their bellies with laughter."