Sandra Oh makes a striking National Theatre debut in Martin Crimp’s hyper-contemporary updating of Molière’s comedy of manners. Alceste, the male aristocrat of the original here becomes Oh’s adamantine, Booker-winning novelist Alice, a stickler for emotional honesty until it comes to her untrustworthy movie-star boyfriend.
The star of Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy also has a host of stage credits in Canada and the US, and here she cuts a chic and diminutively commanding figure, mastering the playful rhythms and clever witticisms of Crimp’s rhyming couplets. Molière’s mockery of social hypocrisy is expanded to cover many ills of the modern world: online misogyny, grievance farming, the surrender of our privacy to Big Tech, people who give unwarranted standing ovations to plays.
As you can tell from that last item, this is also an in-jokey, somewhat pleased-with-itself piece of meta-theatre. Crimp uses Alice as a pen-wielding proxy, standing against the vulgarian hordes of disinformers and the professionally outraged. It’s done with great intelligence but it’s also unfocused and meandering. Indhu Rubasingham’s production gradually winds down like a spinning top: whizzy at first, it topples over at the end.
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We’re in the sumptuous lobby, later transformed into a suite, of what looks suspiciously like the Soho Hotel, by designer Robert Jones. Here Alice upbraids her gay best friend, playwright John (the ever-pleasing Paul Chahidi), for warmly embracing a woman he didn’t recognise. As if to underscore her disdain for social niceties, Alice is accosted by young, pretty, privileged BookTokker and wannabe novelist Esmée (Imogen Elliott) and proceeds to stamp all over her ambitions.
The young woman retaliates online, accusing Alice of sexual harassment. Alice, already potentially losing out on a major literary award because she refuses to withdraw her use of a certain word (we never learn what it is), runs the risk of being cancelled.
Alice’s high-minded calling and adamantine moral code are contrasted with the life of her lover Stefan (Tom Mison), a famous actor with addiction issues, acrimoniously divorced from his conductor wife Elaine (Jemima Rooper). This allows Crimp to indulge in some easy laughs about the supposed vanity of actors and their propensity to shag anything that moves, though some of the jokes have a hard, #MeToo edge.
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Stefan’s two female managers/minders are trying to channel him into woman-helmed, sex-positive films and prestige stage projects to sanitise his seedy reputation. These include an improvised production of The Seagull set in a glass box (another gag to get an in-the-know theatre audience chortling). A young social media manager Allen (Freddie MacBruce) will stoop to hacking to preserve reputations. Alice yearns to escape the online clamour but that genie won’t go back in its box.
This is Crimp’s second, freewheeling swing at Molière’s play (he did a previous version in 1996). He writes wonderfully for actors: there’s a long speech for Rina Fatania’s press agent Indira that rises then falls from a central yelp; and overlapping speeches by Alice and Stefan illustrate that they don’t really see or hear each other. Rhyming couplets can trap actors in a diddly-dee-diddly-dum rut but Oh and Chahidi bring relish and nuance to the wordplay.
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Too many scenes feature two people arguing, and many of them end abruptly. Crimp’s play and Rubasingham’s production are half in love with the rarefied world they are satirising. There are too many knowing asides for the cognoscenti, too many debates about the importance of writing.
It’s a coup for the National to have secured Sandra Oh, and worth seeing this Misanthrope for her, Chahidi and a fine supporting cast. In the final scenes, at the launch for Alice’s novel about a writer immolated after his hand was cut off by Louis XIV, everyone dons wigs and baroque costumes. It’s a nod to the self-defeating excesses of the publishing world as well as to Molière, and it simply doesn’t work.
To 1 Aug, nationaltheatre.org.uk
