The best performance comes from Tom Rosenthal, who, as a colleague of Philip’s who is “more than half in love with easeful sloth”, captures exactly the kind of cultivated idleness that was once a feature of academic life (less so I suspect, in today’s age of targets and tight budgets). Even more extraordinary is the way Hampton’s portrait of a public world gone haywire has acquired an eerily prophetic quality: not only does the notion of proscriptive violence towards selected writers precede the fatwa against Salman Rushdie but there is even a report of a lone gunman terrorising the Palace of Westminster.Įerily prescient … Charlotte Ritchie, left, and Lily Cole in The Philanthropist.
He unwittingly triggers an accidental death, and goes on to outrage an opinionated novelist, alienate his own fiancee and mortify the college’s resident vamp. It famously offers an inversion of Molière’s The Misanthrope in that its hero, an academic philologist named Philip, is a figure whose compulsive amiability causes endless havoc.
Hampton’s play, written when he was 23 and first presented in 1970, remains an astonishing work. Despite the best efforts of Simon Callow as director, however, the relative theatrical inexperience of the cast is clear and deprives the play of emotional texture. Christopher Hampton’s comedy of academic life has always been performed by actors older than the playwright’s specified age ranges, so it must have seemed a bright idea to recruit young stars – such as Simon Bird, Matt Berry and Lily Cole – who are best known for their work in TV drama, comedy and film.
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