Press Archive

The Sunday Times
29 November 2009
by Jasper Rees
source

Keira Knightley takes on the West End with The Misanthrope

Keira’s first West End role is a smart choice. So why does she feel queasy about it?

The professional stage debut of Keira Knightley has been astutely packaged. The star of Pirates of the Caribbean, The Duchess and Atonement has been parachuted into a rhyming play by Molière, but one that allows her to keep a toehold in the world she knows.

Martin Crimp’s version of The Misanthrope, first performed at the Young Vic in 1996, updates Molière’s savage attack on 17th-century social mores to the present-day world of theatre and the media. He has revamped it for this star-studded West End revival. Knightley, 24, plays Jen­nifer, 22, a sizzling-hot American film star who has briefly descended on London. It may not be the lead role, but it’s the eye-catching one around which all the other characters flit. Damian Lewis plays Alceste, a playwright petulantly in love with Jennifer. Tara Fitz­gerald plays an older mentor desperate to hang onto her rights of access to the star.

The production is directed by Thea Sharrock, who has form when it comes to ushering the young stars of Hollywood franchises onto the stage. In Equus, she coaxed out of Daniel Radcliffe a performance of unexpec­ted detail and emotional heft. Lewis, in Band of Brothers, and Fitzgerald, in The Camomile Lawn, both made their name in front of the camera, too.

How did each of you respond to Martin Crimp’s modernised version?

Thea Sharrock: On my first reading, I was amazed the thing did not feel like something that had been written 15 years ago.

Tara Fitzgerald: It’s so nice to read something that’s so irreverent.

Damian Lewis: I knew the play and always loved it. It’s a fascinating theme. The targets have always been the same, since 1666: the hypocrisy and insincerity, the transience of the fashion-based world. It’s now the media-based world, but it’s instantly recognisable.

Keira Knightley: Ditto. [Everyone laughs.]

Could I maybe have a bit more?

Knightley: It made me giggle. That really was it. I’ve been sent things that were very serious, and I read this and thought, “How lovely, that really might be fun.” I’d just been to see quite a few tragedies in the theatre. You get that numb-bum feeling, and I thought, “Ooh, I don’t want to be part of a numb-bum show.” I’d done a lot of serious dramas on film, and I fancied doing something that might actually make people giggle.

All the characters have an unlikeable side. How does this affect your portrayal of them?

Lewis: Alceste is a playwright. He is a man who finds himself feeding off a world that he equally needs and loathes, for all its frippery, insincerity and triviality. He’s just fallen in love with a young woman who represents all those things, but he seems to have put all that vitriol of his on hold while he waits for her to show she is a woman of virtue.

Fitzgerald: Marcia is an actor/teacher who has very much been in Jennifer’s entourage, but now finds herself a social pariah, slightly banished to a cold place, and it becomes important for her that she is reinstated in Jennifer’s court.

Knightley: I play Jennifer, a movie star. She intrigues me. I don’t know whether “like” would be the right word. I think she’s interesting. Ambition is one thing that drives her, and an incredible wish to please. Everybody says throughout that they can’t quite get a handle on what she is. That’s because she presents different faces to different people. You meet her on a day when she’s very much performing for a load of people. She performs in a very specific way, which is to use her sexuality incredibly overtly.

Do you recognise the mental world that she inhabits?

Knightley: What do you mean by that?

She’s an extremely well-known young film actress…

Knightley: Do I recognise being an extremely well-known young actress? Yes. And she’s in the middle of a world full of people who are quite a bit older than her. She’s having a problem with her boyfriend. No comment.

Sharrock: It becomes clear that every character’s world is suddenly either spun on its head or examined by the presence of Jennifer. She doesn’t live here, she’s foreign, she’s here for a short time, yet her presence suddenly magnifies everybody’s life in that moment. We quite quickly talked about other people who had come to mind as examples. And inevitably we had settled on exactly the same people.

This updated version seems to be very specifically about celebrity.

Sharrock: That’s one of the interesting things. The phrase “celebrity culture”, even 15 years ago, wasn’t used so much. It’s what everybody wants. You ask kids now what they’d like to be when they grow up, and the percentage who answer “famous” has quadrupled.

How much does fame have to recommend it?

Fitzgerald: I’m not really qualified to comment.

Lewis: I’d like to hear Keira’s answer.

Knightley: If I’d thought about what fame meant when I was younger, it probably would have been for your name to be respected for something you do well. I don’t know that that is any longer what fame means. I don’t see it in its modern-day connotations as a particularly positive thing.

Lewis: It’s so much more delicious for an audience to be sitting in this version of the play and recognising the targets, rather than being told that this is what everyone was laughing at in 1666. It’s a world we see in tabloids and magazines every day.

As well as the frank portrait of the world of theatre, and the disobliging reference to David Hare, there is an interviewer in the play who seems able to get anyone to say anything. She’s good and, even more implausibly, likeable. Have any of you ever spilled unintentionally?

Lewis: In my second or third job, I was easily marked by a journalist who bought me a couple of beers after a show. I ended up having to write a letter to someone afterwards.

Sharrock: It’s about the journalist. It’s important that every single one of these characters has an attractive quality. Or else it would be incredibly easy to sit and watch this and think, “What a loathsome bunch of people.” I love the way it plays with our profession, as it were. As for whether David Hare will come and see it, to my greatest understanding he missed it first time round.

How technically challenging is it to learn to speak in rhyming couplets?

Knightley: One of the reasons I wanted to do it was that the language was so delicious. We’re trying to make sure that we absolutely have the sense, then use the rhyme as this wonderful tool you can bring out when you want to.

Fitzgerald: It means the characters are able to exhibit great flair when they want to, in a way that perhaps we would find more difficult if we were playing purely contemporary characters.

Lewis: You’re finding ways of ending lines where the rhyme is, and just so hammering those in that they are ingrained — then you can choose to throw them away, just in the way you would probably rehearse with Shakespeare. Martin makes it sound contemporary, and he’s played with the metre.

Sharrock: He specifically stayed away from iambic, so it doesn’t sound like really bad poetry, but rather tried to replicate more how we speak.

Keira, when is the last time you acted on stage?

Knightley: When I was 14.

Sharrock: You never told me about that.

Knightley: Only one night, though. It was National Connections, where they got a load of playwrights to write for schools. I was part of a drama club and my mum [the playwright Sharman Macdonald] wrote After Juliet for us.

You’ve all done more acting on screen. How easy is it to switch to the stage?

Lewis: I think it makes you a much better actor when you come back. It makes you more detailed and less generally wanting to present yourself out front.

Fitzgerald: It feels so different to me. It’s something to do with being in control of what you’re doing when you’re on a stage — that really is not my experience when you’re in front of a camera. The power of the illusion is not possible in front of a camera. It’s responsibility, as well. You are responsible for yourself and for all the others on the stage with you, and the trust that is necessary for a play to lift.

Lewis: That’s the distinction. In film, you don’t have to think about anybody. You learn your lines, you come up with your idea for your part on your own; you might get a day’s rehearsal, you might get one minute’s rehearsal. On stage, the wonderful paradox is, it’s massively empowering while at the same time utterly exposing. You never have that fear on camera. You can do it again.

Knightley: Not that I haven’t worked with lovely people on film, but you never get that feeling of being anything other than alone. You’re not in a company. What’s been lovely about this is that I suddenly realised, “Wow, I’ve never seen any other actor prepare.” It took a couple of days. Thea set an exercise, and I freaked out, because I didn’t understand what it was, and I was, like, “I don’t know if I can do it.” And Nick Le Prevost [the actor playing Alex] went, “It’s fine to fail.” I went, “Oh, yeah, okay, great, wicked.”

Is it therefore the case that the director is less in control in the theatre?

Sharrock: The most difficult part of my job is that we have a rehearsal process in which I am there continually, but when it actually comes down to doing it, I can’t even do what a football manager can do. I can’t even say, “Get back into your formation.” I do know directors who go in during an interval, and I personally think that’s shocking. You have to trust that what you found in the rehearsal room, they understand what it is you want, but they make it their own. It is like taking your kid to school. You have to trust that it is now over to them.

What are the feelings you anticipate having at the first preview, Keira?

Knightley: Before I started rehearsals, every time I thought about it, I wanted to vomit, which I was told was a very natural feeling. What did you tell me to say, Thea? “Bring it on!” [Pause.] Did I sell that?

The Misanthrope previews at the Comedy Theatre, SW1, from December 7