GILES WOODFORDE talks to Adrian Schiller about his role as the odious character in Molire's comedy at the Playhouse "You should be surprised every time, when you realise again and again, that he's a fake," Adrian Schiller tells me. "You shouldn't believe a word the man says."

A comment about a contemporary politician? No, Adrian is talking about Molire's odious character Tartuffe.

"It's quite interesting to think of him as a sort of psychopathic narcissist: if somebody gets in his way, he goes to immense lengths to make sure that his disguise is not blown."

Adrian Schiller is playing the title role in the Newbury Watermill production of Tartuffe, which tours to the Oxford Playhouse next week.

It's a bit of a return home, as he was born in Oxford, and his parents still live in the county. And it was Adrian's parents who introduced him to the theatre.

"I went to the theatre with them quite frequently, and I think I was around ten or 11 when I realised that acting was something I really wanted to do. I just found it rather enthralling and exciting. When I was much younger, I was absolutely convinced, of course, that I was a better actor than anybody else, which gives you a sort of impetus. You have to learn very quickly when you move into the professional world that (a) it's not an attitude that's going to endear you to anyone, and (b) it's probably not true anyway or it's certainly not true!"

As Molire's comedy unfolds, the apparently pious Tartuffe infiltrates himself into the household of wealthy Orgon, who succumbs totally to the humble outward manner of the newcomer. But once he has got him hooked, Tartuffe wastes no time in getting Orgon to change his will. The beneficiary is, of course, Tartuffe himself. The story reminds me of certain doctors down the years, who have taken financial advantage of elderly or confused patients.

"Absolutely," Adrian Schiller agrees. "There are various areas of expertise where we have no choice but to defer. If your doctor says that you need this, or you need that, you're not qualified to tell them differently. You'd probably be a bit of a fool to try and contradict them. It's not quite the same thing with a religious guru, but it is still playing on people's fears and superstitions.

"Frighten somebody, and you can persuade them to do it your way. That could well involve them in writing a cheque. But Tartuffe is very subtle in the way he goes about it, he hardly ever actually suggests anything, it usually works by contradiction."

It's the lower orders who first smell a rat Molire invented pert maid Dorine a full 120 years before Mozart and Da Ponte introduced Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Not one to hold her tongue, streetwise Dorine loudly suggests that Tartuffe may be a wolf in sheep's clothing, while her much better-educated employers seem incapable of realising that they are being conned.

"It's very interesting," says Adrian, "especially bearing in mind the relationship of servants to their masters in that period. Dorine would have been little more than a paid slave. Orgon could have done whatever he liked with her.

"Her bravery in speaking out is difficult to understand now. She really is putting her head on the line all the time. But Tartuffe doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks, because it's Orgon who holds the purse strings."

Adrian Schiller plays Tartuffe with much penitential wringing of the hands, and endows him with a totally fake, cynical humility. Watching him play the part, I was vividly reminded of certain extremely wealthy evangelists who appear on American TV on Sunday mornings. Had Adrian been tuning in?

"I don't think I did actually," he replies. "The self-abasement is there in the text. And there is no contradiction at all for someone who is fundamentally ascetic to be as self-indulgent as they like, because they can say: I don't actually like this stuff, and all that luxury, so it doesn't matter'.

"Also, the delight of this play for an actor is that Tartuffe is talked about so much before he actually appears that you get a great deal of information about the way in which he behaves his pious smile, and his zeal: Orgon says It's immense'.

"He is prepared to make an extraordinary public spectacle of himself, beating himself, or smashing his head against the floor." Just like some American evangelists then? "Absolutely. He is constantly demonstrating how humble he is."

The Watermill Tartuffe is performed in Ranjit Bolt's rhyming verse, English translation, which has a humour all its own. But how difficult is it to deliver the translation to an audience?

"Verse always has its natural metre. That's established very quickly. With rhyming couplets, you don't have to go: te-tum, te-tum, te-tum', it's always there. So if you have a sentence that crosses over two or three lines, you can speak it naturally, and you will still hear the verse structure anyway, because it's got a heartbeat that goes through it.

"In fact, if you did just slavishly observe the metre of the verse and the rhymes all the way through, I think it would become a bit wearing. But the translation is very comfortable to speak."

Tartuffe is the last play that Jill Fraser, artistic director of the Watermill, guided on to the stage before she died in February. This fact alone must mean that no-one involved will ever forget the production, I suggest to Adrian.

"That's certainly right. Although she obviously wasn't well, Jill would never betray that she was tired, or suffering. Once we were into the final week of rehearsals, she came to the first and second run-throughs, she attended both dress rehearsals, she was always there, quietly watching and passing on her remarks to Jonathan Munby, the director.

"It was curious, performing a comedy when somebody who was so much loved by the people she worked with had just died it seemed inappropriate to be performing a comedy on the day she died. But we absolutely did: the feeling at the Watermill wasn't quite that it was business as usual, that would be unfair, but that the job Jill had been doing for so long, the precedent she had set, was so strong that we had to improve on the performance we'd given the day before. Our job was to produce first-class theatre, as Jill had done for the previous 25 years."

Tartuffe opens at the Oxford Playhouse on Tuesday and continues until Saturday. Tickets are available from 01865 305305.