The Misanthrope

Miles of print have been devoted to speculation about Keira Knightley: is she a gorgeous Brit flick talent? A wooden doll? Or just a young girl who is unusually thin? On the strength of this ironically self-conscious theatre role - as an enigmatic movie starlet - you can add 'credible stage actress' to the debate. Yes, her posture's a little stiff, she isn't always heard as well as seen and she's hobbled by an unnatural American accent. But once she gets her teeth into this thin and narcissistic role, she flashes us some promising glimpses of rage and despair beneath the brittle, defensive glamour.

The problem is, she just isn't funny. And it's a problem shared by the whole of Thea Sharrock's flat, unevenly cast production. The comedy in Molière's satire on hypocrisy doesn't make it through into Martin Crimp's disdainful update. Crimp gives the seventeenth-century characters a celebrity era makeover. So bitchy beauty Jennifer has a seedy agent, a pseudo-feminist cow of a drama teacher and a two-faced hack for friends. More importantly, she has an angry playwright-lover (Damian Lewis is Molière's hero Alceste) who uses his unfashionable honesty like a blunt knife on the hangers-on who surround her. The familiar stereotypes should be good for a laugh but Crimp's mid-'90s script is dated and overly pleased with itself: it's not a novelty any more to refer to Derrida or have actors break the stage illusion by addressing the audience, and the script's cleverness can't compensate for updated events that just don't make sense (would Alceste really be sued for a private remark made in Jennifer's hotel bedroom?).

If this production weren't trying so hard to be good it might be better: as it is, the sincerity of the performances and the awkwardness of Crimp's rhymes can be a thunking combination. Lewis is the impressive exception as Alceste because he understands what he's saying well enough really to perform it. He rages against everyone else in a lone spirit of excellence but it's an unequal contest - except when Tim McMullan appears in a cameo as a droning critic, whose fawning self-love and badly-dyed comb-over are as ghastly as his self-penned script. If only the others, Knightley included, could relax and take pleasure in their own double dealing, then there might be barbed fun to be had. As it is, this hollow entourage of fashionable bores leaves you feeling decidedly misanthropic.