Tartuffe

So I went to see a production of Tartuffe at South Coast Rep tonight and I have to say that I was a bit confused by the lighting design. The play, possibly one of the best known classical comedies, began with the type of lighting that one would expect from a horror movie, the stage almost completely dark with faces engulfed in shadow with the vast majority of visible light coming from dim lights offstage right. This started the play off with an unsettling tone which was not conducive to laughter and this barely-visible lighting persisted for roughly ten minutes without any notable alteration. As the play continued it became apparent that the designer was going for a strictly realist approach with the lighting, as sunlight began to become more visible from stage right and gradually, over the course of the entire play, move from one side of the stage to the other as sunlight would as the sun would travel across the sky. This felt extremely limiting because there were no points in the show where lighting was used to accent much of the emotional or comedic content of the play, as the lighting queues were not geared to enhance the story of the play or the emotions of the scenes, but seemed to be simply fixed to the time of day at which the lighting designer thought the moment should take place. This choice was confusing to me, since the acting, the blocking, and the sound design all took creative liberties to breach realism when necessary, but the lighting design was perhaps the most strictly realistic I have ever seen in a play and it did not service the content at all.