Gripping stuff, even without a gasp
The Philanthropist DONMAR THANKS to a defective watch (Timex, since you ask, and a curse on their house) I missed the start of Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist.
This was especially irritating as it begins with one of the most famous coups de theatre in 20th century drama — a playwright demonstrates the grand fi nale of his latest opus to two Oxbridge dons by putting a gun into his mouth and blowing his brains out all over the white wall behind him. It invariably makes audiences gasp.
While they were gasping however, I was in the record shop, buying a triple CD heavy-rock compilation with the spookily apt title of Headbanger’s Bible.
I then ambled to the theatre, thinking I was in plenty of time, only to discover an empty foyer, and the news that the show had started 10 minutes earlier.
It’s a tribute to Hampton’s play, fi rst staged in 1970 and written with extraordinary precocity when he was still only in his early twenties, that despite such a disastrous start to my evening I was continually gripped, amused and touched by this most civilised and entertaining of comedies.
The Philanthropist
was written as a response to Moliere’s Le Misanthrope, in which the central character, Alceste, is notorious for his abrasive candour. Hampton concluded that in the climate of the late Sixties such a character would be perfectly at home but that his opposite, “ a man concerned above all to give no offence and be an unfailing source of sweetness and light, would very likely succeed only in raising hackles wherever he went”.
So we watch as Philip, a philology don with an addiction to anagrams, enrages fi rst the playwright, then a grotesquely self-regarding “ controversial” novelist, then a one night stand and fi nally his exasperated fiancée by constantly trying to be sympathetic, understanding and reasonable.
“My trouble is, I’m a man of no convictions,” he declares in the piece’s most justly famous line, before adding, after a longish pause: “ At least I think I am.”
The great treat of David Grindley’s production is that Philip is played by Simon Russell Beale, a part this marvellous actor might have been born to play.
The great frustration (and one that must be rectified forthwith) is that Grindley stages long passages of the play with the actor sitting in an armchair with his back to most of the audience.
I know the character is meant to be self-effacing but, when you have a performer as eloquent of face and gesture as Russell Beale, this is utterly ridiculous.
But, boy, is Russell Beale good when we can see him. He lends this superficially lightweight comedy an extraordinary depth of pain and embarrassment that is at times almost too excruciating to watch.
It will be a long time before I forget the sight of his plump, utterly desolate face as a femme fatale ruffles his hair as a prelude to bedding him.
He resembles nothing so much as a terrified hedgehog suddenly aware of the oncoming lorry that is about to flatten him. Just as memorably he captures both the loneliness and the fear that underlie the apparent amiability of the chronic “people-pleaser”, a now fashionable psychological condition Hampton seems to have diagnosed before the psychiatrists.
There’s some terrific support too, most notably from Simon Day as the obnoxiously cocky novelist, brilliantly described in Hampton’s effervescently epigrammatic script as “ one of those writers who have been forced to abandon the left wing for tax reasons”, and Anna Madeley who is almost as touching as Russell Beale in the role of his exasperated fiancée.
The revival also seems extraordinarily timely in its blackly comic references to terrorist atrocities.
Don’t miss it and, unlike this idiot, arrive in time for the fi rst scene.