Press Archive

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.