Keira Knightley's West End debut in The Misanthrope is a convincing portrait of an icy little girl lost, writes Christopher Hart

by Christopher Hart, The Times News Review, December 20, 2009

The malcontented Alceste may be the focal point of Molière's finest satire, The Misanthrope, but in this new production the attention is most definitely on the actress playing Célimène. Because the slightly squashed and scruffy Comedy Theatre in London's West End is for a few months being graced with the presence of the second highest-paid actress in the world in 2008: Miss Keira Knightley of Teddington.

She was sweet in her breakthrough film, Bend It Like Beckham, panted and smouldered very prettily in Pirates of the Caribbean, was a sparkling Lizzie Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, and proved herself a real actress in Atonement. But celluloid is a cinch compared with the unforgiving, live-performance glare of the London stage, as tough a place as any pirate ship or cannibal-infested island. Can she cut it?

This terrifically bold adaptation by Martin Crimp fast-forwards the action from 17th-century France to 21st-century London, and Célimène is transmogrified into Jennifer, a young, fast-rising American film star. Whether Jennifer can actually act is debatable, but failure in this department has never been a great obstacle to success in Hollywood, at least not for an attractive young woman who's willing to take her clothes off. Which Jennifer apparently does in pretty much every movie she's been in so far -- but only for the sake of her art, you understand.

Her entire world is epitomised by the set: a lavish hotel room, with empty champagne bottles rolling around under the gilt Louis XIV furniture, and boutique shopping bags sitting on every surface -- mostly unopened. This is the woman that Alceste, a puritanical playwright with an almost sociopathic impulse to tell the plain truth in absolutely every given situation, has fallen for: a woman whose very lifeblood is the fake, meretricious world of celebrity.

Of course there is considerable dramatic irony in Knightley playing a Hollywood star. In 2008 she earned $32m (about £20m at today's rates) or so -- only Cameron Diaz earned more -- and a couple of years earlier she posed naked for Vanity Fair. But no one would say Knightley is just another Jennifer. The great difference is she's got talent.

Initially, her voice is small and squeaky, it must be said, and though it improves after a while, she might do better to warm up backstage first, with a quick run through Smells Like Teen Spirit or something. She conveys Jennifer's brittleness and Machiavellian coolness wonderfully, as well as her malicious flair, stalking about her hotel suite, black satin clinging to her gamine figure, dispensing cruel, witty character assassinations of those not present to an adoring posse of libidinous males.

She is cruellest face to face, when she steadily destroys the self-esteem of her friend -- former friend -- Marcia (Tara Fitzgerald), bit by relentless bit. It's a pretty brave role for Knightley to take on, all things considered: even among a cast of not hugely amiable characters, hers is arguably the least likable of all.

She's a manipulative, world-class flirt, wreathed in simpering smiles and long flicky hair, but there's a superb moment when the act momentarily shudders to a halt. An interviewer dares to interrupt her scintillating solo performance, and she turns and says softly, "What did you say?"

Everyone falls silent, there's a little arctic gust of wind across the stage, and for a heartbeat or two, it's as cold inside the theatre as out. This is one truly icy little girl lost. But crucially she also offers us moments of vulnerability and uncertainty, even of barely concealed panic. Can anything thaw her?

Alceste (Damian Lewis), an aristocrat in the Molière original, is now a playwright, surrounded by movie people -- because theatre people have so much more unsmiling integrity than movie people, you see. He's an awkward, sullen, permanent adolescent, morally outraged by just about everything. Lewis looks distinctly awkward on stage too, but this is surely deliberate, his way of playing Alceste, a ranting, self-appointed social outcast, perversely proud of his gaucheries. And his rapid-fire delivery is excellent, like a Puritan hedge-preacher on full throttle.

The chemistry between Alceste and Jennifer is definitely there, in all its awkwardness and longing. But Alceste's vision of their future life together -- "a little house with a garden, trees, a stream" -- meets with a positively panic-stricken, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no!" Yet it is only Alceste who understands her, and can see all too clearly how her life will pan out without him: the lucrative but rubbish films, the Beverly Hills diet (steamed broccoli and cocaine), the cosmetic surgery, the multicoloured babies, a career path sloping gently downward from about the age of 25, and then steeply as the years go by.

The other star of the evening is Crimp's adaptation itself. Molière's plays may have been simply the dernier cri comedy-wise back at Versailles in the 1660s, but it's also true that those powdered and periwigged marquises and vicomtes used to use the quieter corridors of the palace as handy lavatories. Manners and tastes have changed in more ways than one since then -- and, alas, Molière is no longer side-splittingly funny. What really saves this new production is the wholesale modernisation. "The time is now; the place is London."

Apart from the advent of the mobile phone, pretty much everything else from 1666 -- the poisonous fawning, the spurious, cold-eyed "friendships", the simpering vacuity, the boredom and desperation of the whole charade -- is brilliantly preserved and translated to the horribly recognisable world of today. Crimp's update first appeared in 1996, and 13 years later it's as admirable as ever, needing no more light tweaking and airbrushing than Twiggy to make it appear shiny and new.

Tim McMullan plays a beastly critic called Covington. Critics shouldn't enjoy portrayals of critics on stage too much -- it only adds to our self-importance. But McMullan is a treat, a monstrous slimeball of preening vanity in a double-breasted blazer with silk hankie and distinctive tasselled loafers the colour of baby poo.

There's another pleasing performance from Kelly Price as the ruthless tabloid hackette Ellen, who stitches Jennifer up, though they remain "friends", each recognising their toxic interdependence. All in all, it's a world Knightley must know well at first hand, and a very canny choice for a first foray on stage it is too. The result is wholly convincing. She can cut it.

Andrew Sullivan is away

Caption: Knightley's Jennifer bewitches Alceste, played by Damian Lewis.