Christopher Hampton's comedy, written in the late 1960s, famously inverts Molière's The Misanthrope: it is a study of an academic philologist whose compulsive amiability upsets everyone. But, thanks to the extraordinary presence of Simon Russell Beale, one's thoughts turn to Chekhov rather than to Molière.
On one level, the play could be taken as a campus satire: a group of dons, their girlfriends and a bumptious novelist prattle of private matters while, in the outside world, the PM is assassinated and terrorists declare war on 25 English writers. But Hampton is concerned with psychic as well as social disintegration. His chief preoccupation is with Philip: a shy, unassertive man who, in trying to do good, inadvertently triggers the death of a student playwright, outrages the opinionated novelist and alienates his own fiancee and a promiscuous campus lay. In revolutionary times, suggests Hampton, virtue becomes an incendiary device.
Russell Beale's performance proves this is a play that transcends its time: what it offers is a devastating study of solitude and emotional withdrawal. In Russell Beale's hands, Philip is a man who lives by and through words. His eyes light up when he comes up with dazzling anagrams. Otherwise, like Chekhov's Vanya, he seems uneasy in his own skin and paralysed by sexual and emotional diffidence. The look of forlorn desperation in Russell Beale's eyes as he heads towards a bedroom assignation is unforgettable. And Philip's great speech about a life filled with empty rooms hits a note of desolation which might have come from the Russian master.
I have one complaint about David Grindley's production and Tim Shortall's design: by placing a large chair down left they obscure much of the action. But Grindley grasps the point that this is a play not only about loss and loneliness but about a cloistered, self-sufficient world. And what astonishes one is Hampton's prescience in showing how, outside the groves of academe, society is falling apart and random violence accepted as the norm.
The virtue of the play is its ability to interweave tragedy and comedy. Simon Day is very funny as the right-leaning novelist who proudly boasts of his indifference to human suffering. Danny Webb is equally good as a supine academic who has turned laziness into an art form. Anna Madeley, as Philip's hapless fiancee, brilliantly suggests a woman torn between affection and exasperation for her unlikely mate. But it is Russell Beale's Chekhovian Philip that haunts one. What he conveys is the terror underneath his surface amiability and the solitude he disguises by his delight in language.
This is a performance that ranks with his very best and enlarges one's human understanding.
· Until October 15. Box office: 0870 060 6624
