Press Archive

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. ****