If I were like the critic character in Martin Crimp’s Molière
adaptation, I would now sneer at Keira Knightley’s performance in her
stage début. But the fact of the matter is that she does a
very good job in the role of Jennifer, an American movie star beloved
by the title character, Alceste, who in this version is a prominent
writer. After a tentative first scene, in which her natural bodily ease
seems to be suppressed by an excessive awareness of the scale and
mechanics of stage movement, Knightley gives a confident and nuanced
reading in the role. The irony of the production’s bankability resting
on a British movie star playing an American movie star is only one of
dozens during the evening. Another is that Jennifer’s embittered former
acting teacher is played by Tara FitzGerald, herself a former screen
and media “face” of some standing, but one who clearly relishes having
moved beyond that box.
If these are knowingnesses on the part of Thea Sharrock’s production,
Crimp’s script is stuffed with them. There are repeated references to
how this all sounds oddly 17th-century, in fact like Molière
(the final act even includes a costume party with a Louis XIV theme),
and to the arts/media world. Crimp is a very clever writer, and this is
one of his most ostentatiously clever works. It would play like a dream
on a European stage... but who’s going to bother re-translating an
English translation of a French play? And as it is, the culture
portrayed is simply alien to us. Ours is not a world where movie stars
hang out with public intellectuals, and if you can find me a British
tabloid journalist who pays any attention to postmodernist and
post-structuralist theory I’ll eat my unfinished doctoral thesis.
Without such plausibility, all the allusions and dropped names begin to
seem self-referential and smug. As I say, though, it’s well done, with
Crimp’s revisions of his 1996 script now including nods to Banksy,
Simon Cowell and the “dead white male” epithet applied to critics. (I
have to say that the vain, self-regarding Covington, despite his
recognisably portmanteau name, bears no resemblance to any critic I
know... though perhaps to one or two people who are currently
employed as critics.)
Sharrock directs with a sensitivity towards the springy verse of
Crimp’s text; Damian Lewis is nicely spiky as the pathologically
plain-speaking Alceste (and even suffers a ginger-hair joke into the
bargain), and it is heartening to see such a deliberately unsettling
double-twist ending to a comedy on a West End stage.
Written for the Financial
Times.