The Misanthrope review – Sandra Oh’s London stage debut could have been, should have been, so much better

Sandra, Oh no: The Canadian star deserves more than this uneven adaptation of ‘The Misanthrope’ - (Marc Brenner)

“I hate everyone,” says Sandra Oh’s novelist du jour and the misanthrope of this play’s title. “I used to think it was just men.” It’s one of many such proclamations in Martin Crimp’s gender-flipping but ultimately punch-pulling take on Molière’s 17th century comedy.

Here, our protagonist is not the well-to-do aristocrat Alceste, but the well-to-do author Alice whose career – and a prestigious literary prize – is at risk over her inability to bite her tongue. Not that she cares; Alice cannot stand the hypocrisy of modern society and the flimsy pleasantries it demands. She refuses to “swivel”, as her playwright pal John (a wonderful Paul Chahidi) puts it. He is promptly admonished by Alice for having that night embraced a stranger as a friend so as not to hurt their feelings. The only crack in her armour? Alice’s movie star boyfriend Stefan (Tom Mison), who is fickle and fawning and image-obsessed. “Doesn’t he represent everything you hate?” John asks at one point. Their love affair, though, is not convincingly drawn. Sure, opposites attract, but this guy? Really?

Directed by National Theatre boss Indu Rubasingham, The Misanthrope is Crimp’s second adaptation of the play – his first, staged with Uma Thurman at the Young Vic in 1996, was acclaimed and revived in 2009 with Damian Lewis and Keira Knightley. This time around Crimp has moved the action from 1666, the time of Louis XIV, to the modern day, the time of cancel culture and intimacy coordinators. (Robert Jones’s lavish set design, though, retains some baroque flair.)

As a plot device, it opens up a cornucopia of topics for Alice to mock and rail against – but it all proves too delicious to pass up for Crimp who, like a kid in a candy store, can’t decide and so takes one of everything. The result is a broad satire filled with platitudes and generalised debates about female empowerment, the patriarchy and trolls on the internet. Crimp aims his satire like a fine spritz rather than the firehose jet of Molière’s original.

Sandra Oh (Alice) and Paul Chahidi (John) in ‘The Misanthrope’ at the National Theatre (Marc Brenner)

Oh is apt enough at the protesting and proclaiming and denouncing and ranting that her role requires, but the actor is best in the play’s quieter moments, her fangs retracted and her soft underbelly exposed, as she agonises over Stefan’s fidelity or is actually sincerely sweet with John. It’s a shame these moments are so few and far between. The supporting cast do well to hold their own; Rina Fatania gets a load of laughs as Stefan’s irritating publicist, with a breathless monologue about image rehabilitation in the social media age. Being an alcoholic can actually be an asset if you know how to spin it!

Fans of Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy will undoubtedly flock to the National for the chance to see Oh up close and personal. And certainly in moments, that devotion will be rewarded, but on the whole you’d hope for a more robust vehicle for the Canadian star as she makes her London stage debut.