Theatre review: The Misanthrope

So far Indhu Rubasingham's first year running the National has provided a run of hit shows for other directors, but the ones she's chosen for herself have met with a more muted response. I personally enjoyed a lot of what Bacchae was doing but a similarly loose reinvention of a classic in the Lyttelton hit bum notes for me. Martin Crimp adapts Molière's The Misanthrope as a vehicle for Sandra Oh and the kind of exhausted stubbornness common to many of her screen characters: Oh's Alice is a highly respected and successful literary novelist, but her pronouncements outside of her books don't make her many friends. She's outspoken about inequality, feminism and race, and has recently been attacked in the press for refusing to renege on comments supporting a particular cause (it's unnamed but strongly implied to be Palestine.)

In fact much of what she says seems to me perfectly justified in causing her anger and frustration, but it's the way she expresses it that's the problem: As her best (possibly only) friend, the people-pleasing gay playwright John (Paul Chahidi) reminds her, her lack of tact is resulting in death threats.

On the other hand she seems to have infinite patience for her boyfriend, the actor and recovering addict Stefan (Tom Mison.) Following a messy divorce from Elaine (Jemima Rooper,) he's had a lot of bad publicity and his agent Claire (Abigail Cruttenden) is trying to avoid any more from his new association with Alice.

Rubasingham's production starts, if not entirely promisingly, at least not badly, with Oh and Chahidi as the clashing friends sparkling well off each other. The same can't be said of Oh and Mison, and however much the script acknowledges it (there's a lot of "I know he's hot but...") it's hard to see why he of all people would be the one to break through her cast-iron defences.

Crimp's Molière adaptations stick to the verse of the original plays, and I generally struggle to get on with the awkward plodding deliveries that result, dropping in and out of verse schemes and never quite leaving the actors looking comfortable in what they're saying (Mison was constantly losing his place tonight but everyone gets rendered fairly wooden.)

But for me the biggest issue was how unfocused Crimp's play is. I usually find these French farces hard to summarise, but the skill in them is that all the convoluted plots make sense when you watch them. No longer really a farce, this version doesn't have that kind of tightness - technically the crux of the plot should be Alice ruthlessly critiquing young writer Esmée (Imogen Elliott,) who proceeds to try and get Alice cancelled online (she's also the daughter of Alice's publisher but the possible consequences of this are quickly forgotten.)

But this too gets lost in the long list of Crimp's broad - often deserving, but still scattershot - list of satirical targets. Everything from one of Stefan's publicity team (Freddie MacBruce) constantly using methods ranging from the unethical to the downright illegal to clear his client's digital footprint, to a playwright who writes devised versions of the classics then stages them in a glass box - ironically these digs come from Chahidi, who might find the description suspiciously familiar. It's all a waste of comic talents like Chahidi, Rooper and Rina Fatania, and while Robert Jones' set and costumes give us a memorable final coup de théâtre that takes us back to the story's Baroque origins, the chandeliers can't make up for the spark missing from the evening.

The Misanthrope by Martin Crimp after Molière is booking until the 1st of August at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.