Theatre: The Philanthropist

Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 (0844-871 7632). Until 22 July Running time: 2hrs 15mins (incl. interval) ★★

“Last weekend, I was rashly telling friends how rare it is to see bad acting on the London stage,” said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. “My punishment has been swift.” A witty inversion of Molière’s The Misanthrope, Christopher Hampton’s 1970 play is a rather delicate tragicomedy about a philology lecturer whose compulsive amiability causes endless havoc. But it needs “crack stage acting if it is to have emotion as well as snark”. It doesn’t get it in this “terrible” production. Director Simon Callow’s “callow cast” struggles with the “basics of looking comfortable on stage”, and is comprised of a slate of younger TV actors known for their work on the likes of Friday Night Dinner, The Inbetweeners and Call the Midwife – plus an oddly underpowered Matt Berry (so brilliant in Toast of London). The result is more akin to a “spirited student production” than an evening worthy of the West End.

Thanks to Libby Watson’s elegant designs, this “misconceived” venture is at least easy on the eye, said Henry Hitchings in the London Evening Standard. Otherwise it’s a “woeful dud”, in which “joke after joke fails to land”: it makes the play seem “thin, dated and tedious”. Bizarrely, the actors speak in a “staccato lunge”, said David Jays in The Sunday Times. All, that is, save Lily Cole, who “recites with glacial languor, as if giving dictation. [The actors] titter at laborious witticisms while the audience listens in polite silence.”

Well, I quite enjoyed it, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. If you’ve never seen the play before, you might find it a “bleakly amusing” treat. Simon Bird “delivers the goods” as Philip, the emotionally illiterate lecturer, and Charlotte Ritchie is a “revelation” as his exasperated fiancée. Best of all is Tom Rosenthal as Philip’s slothful friend, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. Elsewhere, though, the cast’s inexperience deprives the play of the necessary emotional texture. Bird in the title role is “perfectly passable”, but where previous inhabitants of it “made me think of Chekhov”, Bird – “knees locked firmly together and a compulsive grin on his face” – calls to mind Mr Bean.

Schindler’s List meets Doctor Dolittle ★★

This is a “remarkable” true-life tale of Holocaust survival, anchored by fine performances from Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh as the married couple who ran Warsaw Zoo during World War II, said Henry Fitzherbert in the Sunday Express. After the Nazi invasion, they sheltered hundreds of Jews in the basement of their bombed-out zoo buildings, then smuggled them to safety under the nose of a Nazi zoologist (Daniel Brühl), who had taken up residence at the zoo. Brühl is likeable one moment, totally psychopathic the next, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. “Haf it stuffed und mounted!” he yells, after shooting one of the zoo’s surviving animals for no good reason. The film is similarly schizophrenic, a weird cross between Schindler’s List and Doctor Dolittle. The incongruity of a genocide film populated by cute lion cubs and baby elephants is too much to take, said Kate Muir in The Times. It was when a gang-raped girl was cheered up by “a fluffy baby rabbit” that my patience finally gave out.