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The Mail On Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Perfect Couplet
The Misanthrope
Comedy Theatre, London
2 hrs 5 mins (including interval)
* * * *
A Daughter's A Daughter
Trafalgar Studios, London
2 hrs 15 mins (including interval)
* * * *
by Georgina Brown, The Mail On Sunday, December 20, 2009
Let's be honest -- and Molière's The Misanthrope is all about truth-telling and its 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 Knightley, 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 Molière's courtier Alceste has been re-imagined as a disillusioned playwright, the self-styled scourge of superficiality, sycophancy and hypocrisy.
Celebrity starlet Jennifer (Knightley) 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 Molière," says Alceste's friend.
But Crimp is also fearless. A talentless theatre critic-turned-playwright (Tim McMullen as a blazered buffoon in tasselled 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's 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.
You'd never guess that A Daughter's A Daughter is the work of Agatha Christie. This is not the unpicking of a murder-mystery, but the unravelling of a terrible emotional crime.
Structurally, the piece has Christie's fingerprints all over it, but the insight is worthy of the great Terence Rattigan, who understood better than most the misery beneath the mask of middle-class merriment.
In the Forties, Sarah returns from the war to find her widowed mother, Ann, engaged to a suitable if starchy widower, Richard (Simon Dutton). The housekeeper, Edith, has already told us that "Miss Sarah was never one to like changes" and the first thing she does when she comes home is to move the sofa back into its old position.
Edith is a typical Christie character: "I see squalls ahead," she predicts, and she's right, for without so much as a glance at Richard, spoilt, sulky Sarah tells her mother: "You can't. He's awful," before adding: "Well, it's your funeral." Actually, it's her wedding, or would have been.
The upshot is that Ann puts her daughter's desires before her own, and then exacts her subtle revenge by failing to prevent Sarah from marrying an out-and-out cad.
Mothers and daughters, the tenderness, the toxicity -- it doesn't get more complicated, which is why this play hasn't resurfaced since its original run for a week in Bath in 1956. Christie's daughter recognised herself in the role of Sarah and the family were extremely uncomfortable about washing their linen in public.
In Roy Marsden's beautifully acted and deeply affecting production, Jenny Seagrove breaks your heart as the decent mother who sacrifices her happiness and then seeks distraction in a string of seedy dates, and Honeysuckle (Foyle's War) Weeks makes a striking West End debut as a period-perfect, pitiless Sarah.
A missing jewel has been restored to the crown of the Queen of Crime and it's well worth seeing.
If you like this why not try ...
More Moliere with The Miser at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, from January 30.
Caption: Starlet fever: Keira Knightley as Jennifer and Damian Lewis as Alceste in The Misanthrope.
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