Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Jessica Tovey, and John Bell in The Miser (photograph by Prudence Upton/Bell Shakespeare)

Fleming’s mischievous approach to his text means we’re never sure where we are as an audience, and the effect is at times discombobulating. We are told the action takes place in Paris, and certainly Harpagon has 10,000 gold crowns buried in a box in his backyard, suggestive of a fortune in pre-French revolution currency, while his son Cléante (Damien Strouthos), who wears a blue, braided, Romantic-era wig and paints his fingers and toenails, seeks a loan in French francs to pursue his would-be betrothed, Mariane (Elizabeth Nabben), whom his father also intends to marry. Yet Cléante opens the second act by addressing the valet La Fléche (the hilariously spindly Sean O’Shea) with one of many Australian colloquialisms littering the adaptation like marsupial roadkill: ‘Where have you been, you wombat?’

Equally, confusion about when the action takes place is never resolved. While Fleming preserves the linear five-act structure of Molière’s original play, director Peter Evans queers the pitch in the opening scene with a contemporary twenty-first-century trope of casting Harpagon’s chief steward, Valère, as a woman (Jessica Tovey). Valère plots with Harpagon’s daughter Élise (Harriet Gordon-Anderson) to gain the old man’s approval for their engagement. This post-marriage equality twist gives rise to a couple of same-sex double entendres. In one of many mutual misunderstandings mandated by farce, Harpagon, who suspects Valère of stealing his buried fortune, asks: ‘So you only wanted the box?’ to which his female steward, thinking he’s asking about pre-marital sex with Élise, answers: ‘Our relationship’s deeper than that.’ Tish-boom.

Meanwhile, notaries take notes on gold iPads, and riffs on ‘rip-off’ interest rates imply current preoccupations with rogue financial institutions charging fees for little or no service. Yet how does this thoroughly modern Molière sit with Harpagon’s centuries-dated obsession that brides must come with a dowry?

Audience members need to ignore these contradictions of time and place. While Fleming clearly loves Molière’s oeuvre, he boldly puts his antipodean stamp on his adaptations. Fleming is also, he tells us, giving us a Molière made to order. In Fleming’s A Molière Anthology (Phoenix Education, 2016), he acknowledges that, while The Miser was originally written in prose, his version is ‘in verse, as requested in the commission, because our audiences have come to prefer and expect it’. In other words, Bell Shakespeare believes Australian audiences won’t tolerate a prose adaptation of the work of France’s most famous playwright, even if that was Molière’s intention.

Sean O'Shea, Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Jessica Tovey, John Bell, Elizabeth Nabben, Michelle Doake, and Russell Smith in The Miser (photograph by Prudence Upton/Bell Shakespeare)

Fleming reminds us that Molière, who also acted in his own plays, suffered from tuberculosis, a disease that would kill him five years later, in 1673, after the première of The Miser, hours after he had performed in another of his plays, The Hypochondriac. Fleming suggests that Molière’s decision to forgo rhymes was pragmatic: he suffered a ‘permanent, nagging cough, [making] it difficult for him as an actor to speak the full line’. But it’s possible that Molière abandoned rhyme for artistic reasons; perhaps he wanted to shed the shackles of the monotonous Alexandrine rhyming couplets of French plays of the period.

Both Fleming’s adaptation and John Wood’s straight English prose translation of The Miser (Penguin Classics, 1953) work humorously on the page. Fleming’s version has a certain pungent punchiness, for instance when Harpagon complains Cléante ‘prance[s] about like Lord Muck with an arse full of Smarties’ or that his son is ‘weak as piss’ with the ‘stomach of a gutted chook’. Fortunately, Fleming’s verse scheme varies according to whether the theme of a scene is love, miserliness, or intrigue. The rhyme is thus less predictable than in Molière’s day and mostly does not overwhelm what the actors are saying.

What stops this witty production from its greater potential payoff is that several members of the supporting cast overplay the farcical physical gestures and gesticulations early in the play while sharing the stage with Bell, who initially plays Harpagon in a subtler register, all the better for him to unravel later, both comedically as a golden-suited, bewigged figure trying to impress his would-be younger wife Mariane that he is a great catch, oblivious to the fact he is universally reviled and ridiculed and that she finds him vile, and more darkly soon after, as he contemplates a meaningless existence without money in the play’s denouement, miming suicide with a vine from his garden wrapped around his neck.

Yes, The Miser is centred on silliness, with deeper contemporary things to say about dysfunction in families and the one per cent who control the capitalist wealth. But even in farce, less can be more. Bell is the master of timing here; a subtler ensemble in the early stages would have rendered the mounting absurdity in the final two acts more effective.

The Miser is being performed by Bell Shakespeare at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House in March and April 2019, with seasons at Canberra Theatre Centre scheduled for April and Arts Centre Melbourne in April and May. Performance attended: March 6.