Lawyers, with their Latin and their 'notwithstandings' and 'whereases', are fair game. Doctors, with their Latin and their enemas and illegible handwriting, are fair game. Churchgoers, with their Latin and penances and hairshirts that's more tricky. So Molire found. Despite his fame and the King's favour, it took five years, a banning, a revision and no less than three petitions before his Tartuffe was authorised for public performance. So what's it all about then?

Here's a comfortable bourgeois household attractive wife, nubile daughter, impetuous son, crotchety grandma, lippy maid. At the head of the household is a solid citizen of limited intelligence, quick temper and a naive faith tipping into credulity. The serpent in this Eden is a smarmy intruder, a conman whose show of outward piety has completely bamboozled the silly man into entrusting him with his home, his affairs and the happiness of his family. The Watermill Company ends a long tour at the Playhouse in a triumphant in some ways a surprising production. They have a brilliant verse translation by Ranjit Bolt, whose deft hand in flexible, speakable rhyming verse is clear, and original baroque' music by the equally experienced Dominic Haslam. The surprise is director Jonathan Mumby's decision to play it straight 17th-century costume, plain opulent furniture, formal speech and debate interspersed with lighter swifter scenes of often physical comedy.

And it worked. Bolt's neat phrases gullible Orgon (Des McAleer) a tartuffomaniac', Mariane (Sophie Roberts) threatened to be tartuffified' in marriage with the ladder-climbing holy man', maid Dorine's (Particia Gannon) low-cut dress called Satan's snare' gave great joy, as did the lovers' quarrel, a favourite Molire balletic scene of advance and retreat.

There were inventions too, like the wheelchair from which Madame Pernelle (Marty Cruickshank) berated the household in a masterly exposition, and the profiteroles licked and sucked by Tartuffe (Adrian Schiller, pictured) while inveighing against the sin of greed and planning to seduce his benefactor's wife (Catherine Kanter).

Schiller's Tartuffe always has a lean and hungry look; slight and pale, he fails to dominate; and the author (who cast a fat actor in the original role) tells us that he is plump and rubicund. The final scenes, where everything comes out all right after all, are a model of suspended disbelief, with Tom Jude waving a writ in ghastly estuary tones, and Chris Porter, splendidly beplumed, turning the tables on the villain. And, just to keep us in 17th-century mood, the actors quit the stage to a gold apotheosis of the Sun King.

Congratulations to the company, and the lasting gifts of Molire. Of course, he didn't tackle politicos or journos. The world as we know it hadn't begun.