Meddling with Molière

The Misanthrope
Comedy

Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets. Shakespeare toyed with this idiom in some of his early plays, then ditched it altogether. Noël Coward, who could turn a rhyme, restricted its use to comic ditties. Those examples should be a pretty clear No Entry sign to modern writers but Crimp has driven straight up the dead end.

His script reveals exactly why Shakespeare and Coward got it right. Whenever a clever rhyme is uttered it’s as if the author has barged on stage to take a bow. ‘The whole world’s a mess. We’ve fucked it. So let’s sit back and deconstruct it.’ That got a deserved laugh but the question is this, which character said it? Answer: it could have been any of them. This lack of particularity erodes any sense of dramatic truth. The ever-present rhymes stick like glue and give the text an inflexible tricksiness. Drama needs eloquence, not its evil twin, wordplay.

The show’s big attraction is Keira Knightley as the brattish beauty pursued by Damian Lewis’s dissenting melancholic. Fans of those pirate films will be familiar with Knightley’s array of facial expressions and she uses both of them here.