Periodically during Rufus Norris’s tenure at the National Theatre, the brickbats (critical, popular or both) have come pelting down on one production or another in his programming. I fear another shower may be in the offing... fear because, although this is in some ways a radical departure from the Tartuffe we thought we knew, and although it doesn’t pull off what it attempts to do, it is nevertheless both an honourable and an interesting failure.

Director Blanche McIntyre and adapter John Donnelly have aimed to restore to Molière’s play the element of controversy which got it repeatedly banned in the 1660s. In Donnelly’s modern-day setting, the familiar target of religious hypocrisy has been augmented – and ultimately eclipsed – by the idea that gullible Orgon has amassed his fortune through illegal insider trading, and that when he invites the supposedly holy man Tartuffe into his household as spiritual adviser, the latter brings with him some of his power base among the socially dispossessed. He may be a selfish, lecherous, deceitful hypocrite, it is suggested, but in crucial ways he may actually be right.

You see why it is only this far into the review that I feel obliged to mention that Molière wrote Tartuffe as a comedy. Donnelly and McIntyre don’t by any means ignore the comic aspect, but they so to speak deploy it: it is no longer the raison d’être of the play, but serves to leaven the heavier material. During some of Orgon’s first-act arguments with assorted family members, it feels as if minutes go by together between laughs. Kevin Doyle does not play Orgon as a comic butt but as a sincerely motivated dupe. Even the comic climax of the second act, when Tartuffe needs little encouragement from Orgon’s wife Elmire to pursue her sexually, is anchored by Olivia Williams’ powerful performance as Elmire in outrage that a woman should be used by a man as a kind of sexual negotiating chip.

Denis O’Hare’s versatility has been on often bizarre view from season to season of the FX TV series American Horror Story. We can see the same skill in his performance as Tartuffe, but can hear precious little of it because, for reasons unexplained, he has doused his lines in an accent unidentifiable with any confidence but probably mostly Hispanic; it’s as if the Reverend Sun Myung Moon came from Guadalajara.

Taking this darker tack helps solve the problem of the implausible deus ex machina ending, when a law officer reverses Orgon’s downfall by declaring that the beneficent King could not allow such injustice to occur; changing the king to a female Prime Minister (and couching the lot in self-parodic couplets) threatens, in 2019 Britain, to be most laughable of all. Then, however, a thumping coda makes explicit that in fact this is just the establishment protecting its own and giving the outsider a routine thrashing, and all trust in either the material or the audience is bludgeoned away. It’s an unfortunate note to end on since, as I say, the evening provides more than enough food for thought, if fewer than enough actual laughs.

Written for the Financial Times.