Review: Misanthrope - The Jewish Chronicle

Two lessons were learned during one of the biggest opening nights of the year. One was that Keira Knightley is a very good actor; the other is that Martin Crimp’s modern London version of Molière’s comedy has less to say about today’s facile obsession with celebrity and status than the 17th-century Parisian original.

Set in a sleek, five-star hotel room, Hildegard Bechtler’s design cleverly acknowledges the play’s roots with gilded cornicing that could have been ripped from a French palace, and makes the Renaissance fancy dress party with which the play climaxes look right at home. Damian Lewis is Alceste, a serious-minded British playwright in love with Knightley’s visiting American movie star, Jennifer. She is famous, happy, beautiful, rich, and Alceste wants to have a serious conversation with her about where it all went wrong.

But the permanent presence of Jennifer’s vainglorious coterie prevents him from hardly getting a word in edgeways. They really are an awful, backbiting bunch. Jennifer’s agent, Alexander (Nicholas Le Provost) is a self-satisfied letch and leech; Jennifer’s fellow actor friend Julian (Chuk Iwuji) also has ambitions to bed the star, while gossip journalist Ellen (Kelly Price) is out to screw the lot of them by dishing the dirt for her scoop. And if these preening poseurs are not enough to make you hate humanity, Crimp turns the poet Oronte in Molière’s original into a theatre critic.

What Lewis’s curmudgeonly misanthrope cannot stand is that they — and, as the play’s message would have it, we — value celebrity as the highest possible virtue. Anyway, back to Knightely.

And that is the joke around which Thea Sharrock’s bouncy production revolves — that Knightley is a famous film star playing a famous film star and, it could be said, represents many of the values hated by Alceste. There are also lots of other gags in Crimp’s verse script — many of the theatrical in-joke kind.

It has less to say about celebrity than the 17th-century original

But as if to prove Alceste’s contempt for our obsession with all that sparkles, the headlines about this production are not about Lewis’s very fine title-role performance — for which he stalks the stage in a permanent grouch, either standing aloof from the trivia that passes before him, or railing against it — they are about Knightley.

Take with a cellar of salt the talk about how brave she is for taking on a role that, it could be said, satirises herself. It was always much more likely that she would be admired for not taking herself too seriously.

But there is real courage here in making her stage debut at the grand old age of 24. For this she has stepped out of the comfort zone of a career that has propelled her from the British indy hit Bend it Like Beckham to Hollywood A-list status. And she passes the test superbly well.

When Knightley is on stage she is the only one you watch, not only because she is beautiful to look at, but because she has stage presence too. As Jennifer, she is utterly convincing as a ruthless flirt who can reduce a grown man to a salivating pup at will, or dismiss him with a flash of almost unthinking cruelty. She is equally hurtful turning well-meaning advice from her mentor Marcia (Tara Fitzgerald) into hidden jibes about middle-age. Sometimes the backbiting here is done face-to-face.

Yet although Lewis and Knightley are individually excellent, together the couple only generate a low-voltage sexual charge. Lewis’s Alceste could do with transmitting more danger than charm, instead of what we get, which is much more charm than danger.

As impressive as Sharrock’s production is, the realisation dawns that for all its wit, Crimp’s play diminishes Molière’s original rather than enhances it. This version is so determinedly modern and pointedly contemporary, it has partially blunted an eternal satire. And the satisfying process of applying 17th-century truths to 21st circumstances has been almost entirely lost.

But there is still much to enjoy here. Tim McMullen especially revels in the role of the theatre critic Covington who seeks the approval of his own play from those he has spent his life criticising. Though even here there is a crude final aside when, as one of Jennifer’s rejected puppies, he declares that she will never receive a good review from him again. Even if he was that vindictive (the truth is, we critics are all far too generous-hearted for such a sentiment), he would not be so stupid as to announce his intentions.

It is moments like these where you want Crimp to be sharper than he is. Elsewhere the play just is not very insightful on a subject it spends two hours or more examining. Not that that matters much. In the world despised by Alceste — the one in the 17th and 21st centuries— only one question needs to be answered.

And the answer is that Keira Knightley is very good indeed.

Comedy Theatre