Tartuffe is one of Moliere's most popular comedies. It was written in 1664 and vividly exposes sanctimony, flattery and hypocrisy. Its main character, Tartuffe, is a complete rogue, seducer, spy and informer. He commits "his dirty deeds" but constantly quotes the Holy Scriptures.

Many outstanding woks have been staged after this play, including Tartuffe by Anatoly Efros with Stanislav Lyubshin, Alexander Kalyagin and Anastasia Vertinskaya in the leading roles, which premiered in 1981 on the stage of the branch of the Moscow Art Theatre named after M. Gorky, in the same building that is now occupied by the Theatre of Nations. That production was staged in a traditional, playful manner. In the new production, director Evgeny Pisarev decided to take a different approach - he proposes to look at the classic comedy plot as a real story. For his version of Tartuffe, Pisarev uses a new translation - with a sharp, ironic intonation and language play. The action is transferred to a modern-day France, to a mansion of a large, but not quite pleasant bourgeois family. In Pisarev’s interpretation, Tartuffe is not a “double-minded swindler,” but a cynic for whom piety and moralizing are weapons with which he wants to take everything away from Orgon: his home, his family, his money…

"I want Tartuffe to be an inverted Prince Myshkin, so I invited Sergei Volkov to play the title role. Several years ago he rehearsed in the play The Idiot, which, alas, did not make it to the stage," says Evgeny Pisarev. "Despite such a serious approach, the genre of our production is a family dramedy in the style of the satirical series The Heirs. And I hope that the audience will find it funny, because all the situations are recognizable, and the parallels are obvious."