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2010.01.08 WSJ.com - A Modern ‘Misanthrope’ on the London Stage (Review)

mokulen37 — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:24:12 +0000

Wall Street Journal
8 January 2010
By Paul Levy
source

A Modern ‘Misanthrope’ on the London Stage

LONDON: Theater. All eyes, of course, are on Keira Knightley, making her West End debut at the Comedy Theatre in Martin Crimp’s updating of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope.” Indeed, it’s impossible to look away from her, as you wonder how someone so fragile-looking can manage all five acts of the structure Mr. Crimp has maintained from Moliere’s biting satire.

So, can Ms. Knightley act on stage as well as on camera? Yes, sort of. In Mr. Crimp’s rhyming couplets-doggerel version she is Jennifer, a 22-year-old movie starlet, whom Ms. Knightley plays with an unmusical American accent, except when her sing-song cadences emphasize the rhymes too much. But she excels at being cutting or rude, and her body language is appropriately sexy.

In Thea Sharrock’s production, with Hildegard Bechtler’s detail-perfect set of a suite in an expensive London hotel, Ms. Knightley is luxuriously supported by a wonderful cast, especially by the top-billed actor Damian Lewis in the title role of Alceste — whippet-thin, angry and with a voice capable of the kind of modulations Ms. Knightley can only dream about. Mr. Lewis’s Misanthrope is a playwright struggling to maintain his integrity, which is strained by his love for the shallow but bitchy Jennifer. There are other superb performances, too, such as Tim McMullan’s portrayal of an easily-identifiable London critic who wants to write plays — to whom Alceste says: “If that’s your idea of contemporary/You should be adapting classics for the BBC.”

Those near-witty but actually clunky lines get to the core of the problem. Mr. Crimp shows facility in writing verse. He crams in passages of psychobabble, of management-speak, of political criticism (there’s a hard-to-miss missile fired at David Cameron) and of actors’ luvvie-talk. But I didn’t believe a word of any of it. How can theater-goers not squirm at the lines “And the human animal looks less fearsome/through the prism/of postmodernism”? Castigating hypocrisy requires candor. There’s no satire without at least a touch of sincerity, and in Mr. Crimp’s Moliere that is lacking.

Until March 13

www.comedy-theatre.com

2010.01.06 Broadway.com - Fame Becomes Her

mokulen37 — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:17:16 +0000

Broadway.com
6 Jan 2010
By Matt Wolf
source

Fame Becomes Her: The Misanthrope’s Damian Lewis Chats About Co-Star Keira Knightley

It’s tempting, but misleading, to think of the new London production of The Misanthrope as “The Keira Knightley Show,” if only because the movies’ popular “it girl” is making her West End debut at the Comedy Theatre with director Thea Sharrock’s production of the 17th-century classic. In fact, Knightley has a supporting role as an American film actress named Jennifer (the play’s Celimene updated to today’s celebrity culture) in this rewrite by Martin Crimp of the Moliere original. But it is leading man Damian Lewis, making his own West End debut, who does the heavy lifting as the misanthropic Alceste, a man who can’t help but calling life’s fakery as he sees it—and who has the dubious luck to fall hard for Jennifer. Broadway.com caught up with Lewis, newly returned to London after several years in L.A. starring on the TV show Life, in the midst of the festive season, where the gifted, ever-articulate Londoner spoke of many things, including his famous co-star.

Congratulations on what must seem for you a sort of homecoming, though I realize your extensive London stage experience [the National, Almeida, Donmar] has never before included the West End.

“Homecoming” seems rather grand but thank you. I have never played the traditional West End, which does have different connotations: those theaters are squarely and firmly in the commercial sector, so it has a different dynamic to it. When I was growing up and was taken to the theater by my dad and grandmother, the traditional end-of-holiday before going back to school theater trip was to go into the West End and usually see an American musical revival like On Your Toes. My dad had lived in Chicago for five years and he loved all those American musicals.

Having just spent several years in L.A., a town not necessarily known for live theater, was it inevitable that you would return to the London stage?

I do feel very comfortable in the theater having spent three years training as an actor: like it’s the place you should rightfully be. All my aspirations when I was young involved theater, so it still has a tremendous romance in that respect. I feel utterly at home in the theater and love it. It’s that curious paradox: it’s as enlivening and liberating as it is terrifying.

Fair enough, though I assume all the media attention focused on a certain co-star takes some of the pressure off you.

Well, it all began as myself and the play. But when Keira got involved and responded so positively and quickly, then, yes, it became an event of a different sort. So far, though, it hasn’t been crazy or overwhelming. At the stage door, there might be 40 or 50 people outside each night. Some are there for Keira specifically, but a lot of them are there because they are theatergoers. At the same time, my responsibility is to the evening itself because Alceste is on stage overwhelmingly more than the other people, so that brings its own pressure. What I have to be sure to do is just concentrate and deliver the play in the best possible way.

You’ve witnessed this sort of event theater before, of course, when you were Laertes in 1995 to Ralph Fiennes’s London and Broadway Hamlet.

You know, I think when you’re in the business and you’re doing well and you have a modicum of fame yourself, you sort of lose sight of how famous people are around you. And you lose sight of the way the public and the media continue to respond to famous people around you. I’ve sort of removed myself from all that: I don’t have a publicist myself, I don’t read glossy magazines, I don’t read the tabloids. That’s the sort of clutter I try to clear away, so the sort of white-hot intensity that is on Keira and the play has in some ways surprised me. I’d forgotten just how famous Keira had become as the second most highly paid actress in Hollywood.

It’s lovely in this production that she is playing a Hollywood film star who is very much in the public eye.

It feeds in brilliantly, and the parallels are terrifically intriguing—ours is very consciously a post-modern take on the play. But this is why Keira’s instincts are so keen on stage and why I think she’s really enjoying it—and is very good. I’ve said this before, but I really think if the media want to take potshots at her, I genuinely believe it will be out of mean-spiritedness. I hope people are as objective as they can be, because it’s very distorting having someone with that much baggage come to do a play.

You mention the post-modernism implicit in casting Keira in this role, which makes this a rare deconstructionist evening on the West End.

It’s absolutely metaphysical; it’s messing with our notion of reality, and it is a coup that Keira’s playing it. It says a lot about Keira and her confidence that she can speak this immortal line, “I am the complete focus of all attention,” and make herself part of the joke. She knows what people have said, she’s not stupid. So what she’s doing is empowering herself massively by joining in the joke, as if to say, “I know the level of my fame and my success and I know that it hasn’t always been a smooth ride critically. I get it.”

Does all this make you reevaluate your own degree of stardom?

Let’s be honest: there’s no way of knowing whether Keira had not been in the show whether myself and an ensemble could have filled the theater in the same way. We certainly wouldn’t have filled it up in such a dramatically quick way. Keira is bringing people to the theater that never go to the theater. We will have nights at the Comedy that will reflect that, where they are maybe not so quick to pick up on the joke but will be having the time of their life watching something utterly new and being in the same room as this beautiful young film star. At the same time, most of them will know who Tara [co-star Tara FitzGerald, who was Ophelia to Lewis’ Laertes] is and who I am and that will be an added bonus. We hope. [Laughs.]

Your director has been down this road before, when she was at the helm of the Daniel Radcliffe Equus here and in New York.

Absolutely. Thea’s not afraid of directing well-known actors. Quite the opposite; I think she relishes it. It’s a nice match for her ambitions.

So, are you and the family back in London now for good? [Lewis and his wife, the actress Helen McCrory, have two young children, Manon and Gulliver, ages three and two.]

We live in London! I went to L.A. for the duration of that job [Life] and absolutely loved my two years there, but the show has been canceled and two years playing the lead where everything revolves around that character meant it was really enough for me anyway. People expect you to go the full six years because that means it’s been the biggest success it can possibly be: that’s a very American view of it. But I was very happy with the two years and am very happy that I’ve been freed up to do things subsequently like this play. Certainly, in terms of the content, the skill of Life, it never should have been canceled. But from a personal point of view, I wasn’t unhappy for it to be canceled.

Which means your kids will be British, not American.

Well, my son was born in America. I’m looking forward to him being president of your country.

2009.12.23 The Oxford Times - The Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:11:29 +0000

The Oxford Times
23 December 2009
By Christopher Gray
source

The Misanthrope: The Comedy Theatre, London

If the National Theatre’s production of The Habit of Art, reviewed elsewhere on this site, is the hottest ticket in town, then the modern-day revamp of Molière’s The Misanthrope at the Comedy Theatre is running a pretty close second. Prospective punters were laying siege to the box office at the performance I attended; a burly security man advised that entry to the foyer was physically impossible and that I had better return a little later.

The fuss has been created, of course, by the presence in the cast of the cinema icon Keira Knightley, making her West End debut in the company of Damian Lewis, another Brit turned screen celebrity. That the lissom and lovely Hollywood star is playing, well, a lissome and lovely Hollywood star has led some critics to suggest that this hardly places a great strain on her acting skills, a remark that is as unfair as it is unkind.

It is the sort of actress she is presenting that calls for careful characterisation. Jennifer may be vain, manipulative and callous in her taking up and laying aside of lovers, but she still possesses mischievous appeal and wit enough to catch, and hold, even the acidulous, celeb-loathing playwright Alceste – the misanthrope of the title, although, as Lytton Strachey observed, his problem is really more his sensitiveness than his misanthropy. He is brilliantly presented by Lewis, who really spits out the many cleverly crafted insults placed in his mouth by Martin Crimp in his neatly rhyming version in English.

Since its first airing in the mid-1990s, the play has been updated to take account of David Cameron with “his toxic, spray-on brand of fake compassion”. Interestingly, there has also been a change in the hit list of fellow playwrights feeling the rough edge of Alceste’s tongue, with Tom Stoppard now substituting for the saintly Alan Bennett. Perhaps Alceste’s most vicious abuse, though – and we must surely think he deserves it – is reserved for the oily drama critic and would-be dramatist Covington, who is portrayed in a fine comic performance by Tim McMullan.

Jennifer is also in the first-division when it comes to holding her own in an argument as we see in the set-piece ructions with her odious former drama teacher (Tara FitzGerald) and the jealous Alceste himself. That she, like him, really has no time for fools – though, unlike him, is prepared to suffer them for the sake of her career – is subtly implied in Knightley’s performance.

Ably directed by Thea Sharrock and with a memorable setting in a swanky London hotel suite supplied by designer Hildegard Bechtler, the play must not be missed.

Until March 13. Tel: 0870 060 6637
(www.ambassadortickets.com/london).

2009.12.23 Financial Times - Molière among the media folk (Review)

mokulen37 — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:06:24 +0000

Financial Times
23 December 2009
By Ian Shuttleworth
source

Molière among the media folk

If I were like the critic character in Martin Crimp’s Molière adaptation, I would now sneer at Keira Knightley’s performance in her stage debut. But the fact is that she does a good job in the role of Jennifer, an American film star beloved by the title character, Alceste, who in this version is a prominent writer. After a tentative first scene, in which her natural bodily ease seems to be suppressed by an excessive awareness of the scale and mechanics of stage movement, Knightley gives a confident and nuanced reading of the role.

The irony of the production’s bankability resting on a British film star playing an American film star is only one of dozens during the evening. Another is that Jennifer’s embittered former acting teacher is played by Tara FitzGerald, herself a former screen and media “face” of some standing, but one who clearly relishes having moved beyond that box.

If this is knowingness on the part of Thea Sharrock’s production, Crimp’s script is stuffed with it. There are repeated references to how this all sounds oddly 17th-century, in fact like Molière (the final act even includes a costume party with a Louis XIV theme), and to the arts/media world.

Crimp is a clever writer, and this is one of his most ostentatiously clever works. It would play like a dream on a continental European stage . . . but who’s going to bother re-translating an English translation of a French play? And as it is, the culture portrayed is simply alien to us. Ours is not a world where film stars hang out with public intellectuals, and if you can find me a British tabloid journalist who pays any attention to postmodernist and post-structuralist theory I’ll eat my unfinished doctoral thesis.

Without such plausibility, all the allusions and dropped names begin to seem self-referential and smug. As I say, though, it’s well done, with Crimp’s revisions of his 1996 script including nods to Banksy, Simon Cowell and the “dead white male” epithet applied to critics.

Sharrock directs with a sensitivity towards the springy verse of Crimp’s text; Damian Lewis is nicely spiky as the pathologically plain-speaking Alceste (and even suffers a ginger-hair joke into the bargain), and it is heartening to see such a deliberately unsettling double-twist ending to a comedy on a West End stage. ****

2009.12.22 Metro.co.uk - Irony of Keira Knightley’s star splash in The Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:57:11 +0000

Metro.co.uk
22 December 2009
By Siobhan Murphy
source

Irony of Keira Knightley’s star splash in The Misanthrope

The burning question about this latest production of Martin Crimp’s modern take on Molière’s comedy of manners is, obviously, is Keira Knightley any good?

In short, yes; she’s much better than her (canny) pre-first night pronouncements would have led you to believe but – beautiful as she is – she doesn’t command as much attention on stage as you’d hope.

As Jennifer, the Hollywood film star making a splash on the London circuit, Knightley shows an awareness of the dramatic irony involved in her casting without having the confidence to really play on it. In her coruscating attacks on her hangers-on, though, she does show how she and Damian Lewis’s Alceste, the misanthrope of the title, are unlikely soulmates.

Crimp has moved the target from 17th-century French aristocracy to the fawning modern media industry, so here Alceste is a put-upon playwright who abhors the mendacity of the self-absorbed world he’s part of but who finds his attempts to speak the plain truth just end up with him being served with writs.

Lewis relishes his role as self-appointed ranting outcast, delivering Crimp’s clever, fluid verse with elan and delightedly toying with the post-modernism of the whole occasion. Thea Sharrock’s production has the boldness and vigour that Crimp’s script needs, plus an excellent supporting cast. Whether Crimp’s update is built to last in the same way as Molière’s classic is doubtful but it makes for a boisterously entertaining evening. Siobhan Murphy

Until Mar 13, Comedy Theatre, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Wed and Sat mats 2.30pm (Dec 24 2.30pm only, no perf Dec 25), £20 to £65. Tel: 0844 871 7612. Tube: Piccadilly Circus

2009.12.20 The British Theatre Guide - One of the highlights of the season, if not the year (Review)

mokulen37 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:15:27 +0000

The British Theatre Guide
20 December 2009
By Philip Fisher
source

One of the highlights of the season, if not the year

With the draw of the elfin Keira Knightley, Thea Sharrock’s updated revival of Martin Crimp’s cynically sharp version of the Molière classic did not need to be good to sell out. However, it has turned out to be one of the highlights of the season, if not the year.

The only question on most people’s lips was whether the indisputably gorgeous Hollywood icon would embarrass herself in making a belated stage debut. The actress is helped by playing a character that must contain much of her milieu and herself, albeit with an American accent.

After a nervous opening, the Atonement and Pirates of the Caribbean heroine really comes into her own, as her film starlet character gets angry with her insufferably jealous lover after the interval. From that point, she acts as if to the (West End) manor born in very strong company.

Molière always knew how to look at life with wry humour and Martin Crimp has a similar, if more modern, outlook and love for his language. He has matched the maître rhyming couplet for rhyming couplet and throughout writes with sparkling wit about the emptiness of celebrity under the relentless media spotlight.

The real star is red-headed Band of Brothers actor, Damian Lewis in the title role of Alceste. He plays a writer who, despite the efforts of his long-suffering friend, Dominic Rowan’s John, takes a personal vow to tell things as they are, whomever he might offend along the way.

In principle this sounds fine but when you are dating a hot Valley Girl film star and moving amongst her sycophantic circle, the consequences can be pretty bloody. Lewis plays up the misanthropism, which quickly involves wilful self-destruction, successfully expressing his character’s mental tug of war.

Alceste doesn’t help himself and his jealousy inevitably offends and riles Jennifer. However, everyone else on show mixes big doses of both the bold and the precious in her presence with equally disastrous and comic results.

On a stylish Hildegard Bechtler set that balances Louis XIV with post-post modern, the catalyst for much of the trouble is a Heat-style celeb-secrets journalist Ellen, played by Kelly Price. Her publication of Jennifer’s revelations, which are at the same time true and deeply offensive, is tasteless but so shallow is this world that the beautiful are instantly forgiven by the greedy and lustful.

The leads are supported brilliantly by Tara Fitzgerald as strident, sexually frustrated neo-feminist Marcia, who covers her vulnerability with bombast. Almost equally entertaining are Rowan (Nicholas Le Prevost playing a larger than life agent) and Tim McMullan’s critic turned hack playwright, Covington, the most obvious émigré from the Comedie Francaise, with his deliberately mannered acting style.

In five short acts over two hours, we learn vast amounts about the attitudes of today’s superstars both real and wannabe but also to some extent their equivalents 350 years ago. Pleasingly, the humour rarely lets up and Crimp’s/Molière’s poetry just keeps on surprising with its versatility.

Thea Sharrock is fast becoming the hottest young female director around and when you can call on Keira Knightley, Damian Lewis and Tara Fitzgerald for a French play from the Seventeenth Century, you know that you have made the grade.

On this occasion, a very rich mix of ingredients turns out to be a feast fit for a (Sun) King.

2009.12.20 The Mail on Sunday - The Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:48:04 +0000

The Mail on Sunday
20 December 2009
source

The Misanthrope

Let’s be honest – and Moliere’s The Misanthrope is all about truth-telling and it’s perils, so we should – not many people at the play’s opening at the Comedy Theatre this week were there to brush up on 17th Century satire.

The big attraction was Keira Knightly, best known for being extremely thin and absolutely massive in films, making her stage debut.

Martin Crimp’s razor-sharp, brilliant version updates the classic to a super-cool, contemporary hotel in London (Hildegard Bechtler’s hip set mixes ultra-modern furniture with gilded antiques) where Moliere’s courtier Alceste has been re-imagined as a disillusioned playwright, the self-styled scourge of superficiality, sycophancy and hypocrisy.

Celebrity starlet Jennifer (Knightly) should represent everything he most despises, but when it comes to gorgeous girls, Alceste has a blind spot. The tone is deliciously knowing, amused and amusing.

‘I have to say that this so-called rage would make more sense on the 17th Century stage. And surely, as a playwright, you’re aware of sounding like something straight out of Moliere,’ says Alceste’s friend.

But Crimp is also fearless. A talentless theatre critic-turned-playwright (Tim McMullen as a blazered buffoon in tasseled loafers) whose name, Covington, is surely a combination of two of my esteemed colleagues’ names, is savaged when he asks Alceste for his opinion of his own dismal play. ‘The dialogue’s weak. The acid test is to reflect the way that people really speak,’ says Alceste.

Crimp’s characters, by sharp contrast, don’t just talk the talk – in couplets bursting with internal rhymes, which he peppers with up-to-the-minute references and idiomatic ‘whatevers’ – but they also walk the walk, usually in designer trainers.

So what of Keira? She plays the flirty American Jennifer who basks in her own celebrity without believing the surrounding hype, and she’s as poised as she is plausible. Her accent is spot-on and few actresses would look more glamorous in a jump suit.

But this is a world away from great acting, partly because the role doesn’t demand it. Knightley is compelling because she’s celluloid made flesh (bone, actually) and luminously lovely, not because she’s the Judi Dench of her generation.

The real star in Thea Sharrock’s handsome production is Damian Lewis’s explosively irascible Alceste, who rides Crimp’s verse like a bucking bronco. Awesome.

2009.12.20 The Observer - The Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:34:23 +0000

The Observer
20 December 2009
By Susannah Clapp
source

The Misanthrope

She’s as sculpted and svelte as a trophy. She’s the coquette as maquette. It was truly ingenious to cast Keira Knightley in Martin Crimp’s updated version of The Misanthrope. Knightley plays a Hollywood actress, a magnified version of her public self. The less she acts, the more she becomes the part. Crimp’s play, given a sparky production by Thea Sharrock, carps at suckers-up to celebrity and at media minions; it does so with many postmodernist winks. And what’s more postmodern than an attack on celebrity culture which features a celebrity?

First seen in 1996, and now revised, Crimp’s adaptation has a go at bankers and at Tom Stoppard; it creates a critic called Covington – bit of a cut and shunt with reviewers’ names there – who’s a would-be playwright with bad hair and a blazer; it alludes knowingly to Molière. It does all this in tremendously dextrous, fluent verse.

Which is where you see the difference between an actor and a star. When Damian Lewis, the bilious anti-hero – or truth-telling hero – speaks, he makes you wonder why more plays aren’t written in verse. Alternately clenched with disgust and exploding into fountains of fulmination, he surfs the rhythm, and hits the rhymes as if they were thrown up by his disdain. Knightley is crisp and even – and she isn’t meant to be deep – but she’s too careful with her speech to be really funny. You can see her heading towards the end of a line; she pauses slightly before the start of the next so that the sense is slightly fractured. When Tara Fitzgerald storms in as a tyro teacher and scourge of disappointing men, her cheekbones disappear under the clouds of her self-righteousness. Knightley remains her beautiful self. Until, that is, the end of the evening when she appears in 17th-century costume – a dark silk ballgown and a pale blond wig that makes her head look as if it’s framed by a dandelion. She changes then, and begins to show what she might be able to do. As the expected happy resolution is withheld, she turns her face towards the audience with an extraordinary look of sadness. Before heading back to the world of celebrity.

2009.12.20 The Sunday Times - Keira Knightley cuts it as the cruel flirt in Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:25:01 +0000

The Sunday Times
20 December 2009
By Christopher Hart
source

Keira Knightley cuts it as the cruel flirt in Misanthrope

Keira Knightley’s West End debut in The Misanthrope is a convincing portrait of an icy little girl lost

The malcontented Alceste may be the focal point of Molière’s finest satire, The Misanthrope, but in this new production the attention is most definitely on the actress playing Célimène. Because the slightly squashed and scruffy Comedy Theatre in London’s West End is for a few months being graced with the presence of the second highest-paid actress in the world in 2008: Miss Keira Knightley of Teddington.

She was sweet in her breakthrough film, Bend It Like Beckham, panted and smouldered very prettily in Pirates of the Caribbean, was a sparkling Lizzie Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, and proved herself a real actress in Atonement. But celluloid is a cinch compared with the unforgiving, live-performance glare of the London stage, as tough a place as any pirate ship or cannibal-infested island. Can she cut it?

This terrifically bold adaptation by Martin Crimp fast-forwards the action from 17th-century France to 21st-century London, and Célimène is transmogrified into Jennifer, a young, fast-rising American film star. Whether Jennifer can actually act is debatable, but failure in this department has never been a great obstacle to success in Hollywood, at least not for an attractive young woman who’s willing to take her clothes off. Which Jennifer apparently does in pretty much every movie she’s been in so far — but only for the sake of her art, you understand.

Her entire world is epitomised by the set: a lavish hotel room, with empty champagne bottles rolling around under the gilt Louis XIV furniture, and boutique shopping bags sitting on every surface — mostly unopened. This is the woman that Alceste, a puritanical playwright with an almost sociopathic impulse to tell the plain truth in absolutely every given situation, has fallen for: a woman whose very lifeblood is the fake, meretricious world of celebrity.

Of course there is considerable dramatic irony in Knightley playing a Hollywood star. In 2008 she earned $32m (about £20m at today’s rates) or so — only Cameron Diaz earned more — and a couple of years earlier she posed naked for Vanity Fair. But no one would say Knightley is just another Jennifer. The great difference is she’s got talent.

Initially, her voice is small and squeaky, it must be said, and though it improves after a while, she might do better to warm up backstage first, with a quick run through Smells Like Teen Spirit or something. She conveys Jennifer’s brittleness and Machiavellian coolness wonderfully, as well as her malicious flair, stalking about her hotel suite, black satin clinging to her gamine figure, dispensing cruel, witty character assassinations of those not present to an adoring posse of libidinous males.

She is cruellest face to face, when she steadily destroys the self-esteem of her friend — former friend — Marcia (Tara Fitzgerald), bit by relentless bit. It’s a pretty brave role for Knightley to take on, all things considered: even among a cast of not hugely amiable characters, hers is arguably the least likable of all.

She’s a manipulative, world-class flirt, wreathed in simpering smiles and long flicky hair, but there’s a superb moment when the act momentarily shudders to a halt. An interviewer dares to interrupt her scintillating solo performance, and she turns and says softly, “What did you say?”

Everyone falls silent, there’s a little arctic gust of wind across the stage, and for a heartbeat or two, it’s as cold inside the theatre as out. This is one truly icy little girl lost. But crucially she also offers us moments of vulnerability and uncertainty, even of barely concealed panic. Can anything thaw her?

Alceste (Damian Lewis), an aristocrat in the Molière original, is now a playwright, surrounded by movie people — because theatre people have so much more unsmiling integrity than movie people, you see. He’s an awkward, sullen, permanent adolescent, morally outraged by just about everything. Lewis looks distinctly awkward on stage too, but this is surely deliberate, his way of playing Alceste, a ranting, self-appointed social outcast, perversely proud of his gaucheries. And his rapid-fire delivery is excellent, like a Puritan hedge-preacher on full throttle.

The chemistry between Alceste and Jennifer is definitely there, in all its awkwardness and longing. But Alceste’s vision of their future life together — “a little house with a garden, trees, a stream” — meets with a positively panic-stricken, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” Yet it is only Alceste who understands her, and can see all too clearly how her life will pan out without him: the lucrative but rubbish films, the Beverly Hills diet (steamed broccoli and cocaine), the cosmetic surgery, the multicoloured babies, a career path sloping gently downward from about the age of 25, and then steeply as the years go by.

The other star of the evening is Crimp’s adaptation itself. Molière’s plays may have been simply the dernier cri comedy-wise back at Versailles in the 1660s, but it’s also true that those powdered and periwigged marquises and vicomtes used to use the quieter corridors of the palace as handy lavatories. Manners and tastes have changed in more ways than one since then — and, alas, Molière is no longer side-splittingly funny. What really saves this new production is the wholesale modernisation. “The time is now; the place is London.”

Apart from the advent of the mobile phone, pretty much everything else from 1666 — the poisonous fawning, the spurious, cold-eyed “friendships”, the simpering vacuity, the boredom and desperation of the whole charade — is brilliantly preserved and translated to the horribly recognisable world of today. Crimp’s update first appeared in 1996, and 13 years later it’s as admirable as ever, needing no more light tweaking and airbrushing than Twiggy to make it appear shiny and new.

Tim McMullan plays a beastly critic called Covington. Critics shouldn’t enjoy portrayals of critics on stage too much — it only adds to our self-importance. But McMullan is a treat, a monstrous slimeball of preening vanity in a double-breasted blazer with silk hankie and distinctive tasselled loafers the colour of baby poo.

There’s another pleasing performance from Kelly Price as the ruthless tabloid hackette Ellen, who stitches Jennifer up, though they remain “friends”, each recognising their toxic interdependence. All in all, it’s a world Knightley must know well at first hand, and a very canny choice for a first foray on stage it is too. The result is wholly convincing. She can cut it.

2009.12.18 The Guardian - The Misanthrope (Review)

mokulen37 — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:12:12 +0000

The Guardian
18 December 2009
By Michael Billington
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The Misanthrope

Can Keira Knightley cut it? That is the first question prompted by this revival of Martin Crimp’s updated version of Molière’s play. Since she’s playing a movie star in her 20s, one could say that she is not unduly stretched. But Knightley brings to the role fine, sculpted features, palpable intelligence and a nice mix of faux-innocence and flirtiness. Even if she doesn’t always know what to do with her hands, she gives a perfectly creditable performance.

My main doubt concerns the continuing validity of Crimp’s modern-dress Molière, first seen in 1996. It rests on the premise that Alceste is a vehemently candid playwright who rails at the triviality of contemporary culture but is erotically ensnared by the movie star, Jennifer, who is one of its proudest embodiments. Crimp has also included a diatribe against a Tory politician with his “toxic spray-on brand of fake compassion” and a reference to “dead white male critics”. Revealingly, however, the name of Tom Stoppard has been substituted for Alan Bennett in Alceste’s acrimonious attack on fellow dramatists: a sure sign of Bennett’s revered status.

But even in 1996 I felt that Crimp’s version, for all its topical zest, was a shadow of the original. Molière’s Alceste risks arrest through his attack on a court versifier. Crimp’s Alceste, in pointing out the absurdities of our media-driven celebrity-culture, hazards little. I could envisage him being offered a Guardian column and a spot on Channel Four.

Molière wrote a complex, ambivalent play that asked how far one should accept the rules of the society in which one lives: here it simply becomes an amusing diversion. Fortunately, in Thea Sharrock’s production, it is cast from strength. Damian Lewis has the right mix of righteous anger and comic absurdity as Alceste. There’s a tell-tale moment when, having inveighed against the human race, he is asked about his paradoxical passion for Jennifer. “She’s young and vulnerable,” says Lewis in the gooey, forgiving tones of the besotted intellectual. And, although he finally sees through Jennifer’s fickleness, he never lets us forget that sex is often the idealist’s achilles heel.

Knightley’s Jennifer is also no mere airhead. Floating around in a silky black jumpsuit, she looks terrific. But, more to the point, she shows that Jennifer’s withering attacks on superbrat actors, greedy agents and power-mad drama coaches are simply a bitchier version of Alceste’s own truth-game: in short, Knightley intelligently underscores the reason for their mutual attraction.

There is also a delicious cameo from Tim McMullan as a drama critic named Covington – can’t think where Crimp got the name from – who has aspirations to be a playwright. With a manner that is alternately vain, smarmy and blustering and a Wildean belief that criticism is itself an art, McMullan offers a wickedly funny caricature of us hacks at our worst. It all makes for a pleasantly jokey evening. It’s only when you relate Crimp’s version to the tragi-comic world of Molière’s original masterpiece that it falls seriously short.