REVIEW: Moliere: The Last Laugh, Perfect Fools in association with Block Learning Ltd, Prague Fringe 2026 ★★★

Moliere. A bloodied cloth on his face. He removes it and calls for his servant. He is dying, and this is his final testament. 

Moliere: The Last Laugh is a well-worked piece of theatre carried by a brilliant performance. Gordon Duffy-McGhie acts in a style that hearks back to an old school of acting where the voice and rhythm is all. It makes him engrossing, utterly engrossing. He takes us through the twists and turns of Moliere’s life as a sort of lived biography. Critics have personas (snooty and emasculate, naturally) actors demanding pay have personas, Moliere exhaling through a feather becomes a beautifully crafted love scene. Indeed white feathers and black feathers become a recurring symbol, as do papers, for good and evil, for life, death and taxes. As far as the stagecraft of the work goes, it is a beautifully worked performance. 

The register chosen for this adaptation however, never finds the form of the radicalism it documents. Two masks onstage aren’t worn by Duffy-McGhie himself when Moliere’s theatre used masks near constantly. The performance namedrops, but only significant texts. If we’re only going to focus on Tartuffe, Don Juan and the crucial to the plot Imaginary Invalid in detail it makes the play feel like too neat a summary, sometimes teetering too close to a pedagogical experience and not a theatrical one. 

Indeed, what you have in Moliere’s theatre is intrinsically theatrical, it is a theatre, as Duffy-McGhie tells us himself, that was born through memories of Commedia as ‘Gods’ and formed not in the Parisian playhouses, but in alternative spaces, on the street. It is perhaps not the best artistic legacy to examine through the form of text-first Fringe one person show. 

In this style too, the adaptation is too willing to place Moliere as the unexamined hero. The fact he married a teenager is brushed over and instead the focal point is critics tarnishing his legacy. It might be that these the conclusions drawn here are the conclusions the audience will reach – but this adaptation would be better showing us its research methods, sources and counter-sources. More nuanced portrayals of these ‘great men’ will get us closer to the complexities around them, and allow us to make up our own minds. 

This is a finely acted piece of theatre. It has a high degree of stagecraft that is compelling and watchable, and although the adaptation falters slightly, it is a good performance worth seeing at the Prague Fringe for anyone interested in wanting to find out a little more about France’s most famous playwright.

Recommended Drink: Any kind of nice French red I think.

You can catch Moliere: The Last Laugh at the Prague Fringe on 30 May from 17:15. Tickets are available through the Prague Fringe Online Box Office.