Press Archive

The Mail on Sunday
20 December 2009
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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.