The Misanthrope

 First thing to say is that Sandra Oh is fantastic, and she is surrounded by an excellent cast for this reworking of Moliere’s classic about the hypocrisy of aristocratic society.  Oh plays Alice, a straight talking writer who is being pursued to apologise for things she has said.  Paul  Chahidi plays her friend John, and Tom Misan as Stephan her younger lover, both doing a fantastic job in providing a counterbalance and foil to Alice's passionate inflexibility. Jemima Rooper is also perfect in her relatively small role as Stephan’s bitter ex wife, using social media to cause real life damage.  

Alice, in this version of the play is a writer who is wedded to honesty and telling the truth as she sees it, with no patience for dissembling, compromise or taking a pragmatic path.  This eventually affects her career and her relationships.  Completely rewritten with an up to date focus on narcissism, cancel culture, social media pile-ons, online misinformation all mixed up with debates around patriarchy and women’s empowerment.  I also loved the meta jokes  and observations about theatre, and the direct addresses to the audience which were very entertaining but also allowed some reflections on performance versus reality.   

The play is funny and fast moving but also sometimes quite confusing.  Written in verse, the meaning was sometimes a bit difficult to disentangle, particularly when more than one conversation was going on at one time.   There is a lot packed into 105 minutes with no interval, and that I feel is its biggest weakness - in trying to go after so much it was difficult to grab onto anything in particular, and so our walk back to the station was mainly us trying to pick through it all to make sense of it.  Despite that, I think I generally got the drift, and had a lot of sympathy with Alice, whilst my own approach to social media and modern culture is a lot more nuanced.

At its heart, this is about whether we should conform to the social mores of our time, or whether we should stand against them, even as a lone voice. It managed to make me like the various friends around Alice, whilst still sympathising with her frustration about their lack of energy in standing up to the hypocrisy and dissembling that she sees around her.  

I really liked the set which kept a sort of neoclassical style throughout, reminding us of its 17th century roots, and this is something which feeds into the clever costume changes as the play progresses.  The final reveal which strips the set back to basics whilst upping the costumed frippery and giving us a mannered but also quite unsettling dance was very clever, making the disconnect between Alice and the others visually explicit as she rejects those societal norms, or maybe it rejects her. 

There’s an awful lot to enjoy here, but the primary reason is to have Sandra Oh packing a high energy performance - the stage crackles when she is on it.  Whilst it is messy and theows out loads to think about without properly unpacking it, this is still a good couple of hours in the theatre with a lot of fun to be had.