| . | 04/29/2009
The Philanthropist
By: Victor Gluck
Matthew Broderick and Steven Weber
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
Matthew Broderick has made a career out of playing naïve innocents. However, in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton’s 1970 mordant comedy of British academics and sexual politics, he is asked to play a pedant who is dense, which is something quite different. He is also best while playing straight man to a foil as in his star turns opposite Nathan Lane in The Producers and The Odd Couple. In The Philanthropist his character Philip is on his own and inhabits his own world. The results are disappointing to say the least.
Director David Grindley, who staged the Donmar Warehouse revival in London in 2005, has left his cast adrift with both the play’s characterizations and its humor. This is a surprise after his exquisite production of The American Plan earlier this season and his Tony Award winning revival of Journey’s End in 2007. Both the timing and rhythms are wrong so that the wry humor does not reach its many targets. Like Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, this is a very British play and the delivery needed is different from American speech. Much of the dialogue falls flat, both humorous and provocative lines. The gimmick of posting the names of the seven deadly sins at the top of the back wall of the set before each scene suggests that the director has not trusted the play to relay its own message.
Another major problem is Tim Shortall’s huge set. The sound in the two-story living room which reaches up to the rafters of the stage is hollow and empty, like much of the set design. We are told that Philip has lived in his rooms at the university for 12 years. However, the blank white upstage wall and clean surfaces do not suggest meticulousness so much as an empty inner life. Anyone who knows college professors knows how cluttered their offices end up with piles of books and papers everywhere. The one unusual item, a 15-shelf bookcase which reaches past the ceiling line of the two story room, is simply distracting rather than symbolic of a bookish life. The room ought to be claustrophobic to suggest the hothouse life of an institution of higher learning peopled by self-absorbed scholars separated from the real world.
Although playwright Hampton has written many original scripts, he is best known now for his successful stage and screen adaptations which include Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Quiet American, The Secret Agent, the musical Sunset Boulevard, as well as his translations of the French plays of Yasmina Reza including the current God of Carnage. His third play, The Philanthropist was written in response to Moliere’s The Misanthrope whose hero alienates everyone by his brutal honesty which he means as a mark of sincerity. In The Philanthropist, Philip, a professor of philology at an English university, wants so much to be liked that his philanthropy is taken for subtle hypocrisy. One of the play’s many ironies is that as a philologist, he doesn’t care what people say but is more interested in how they say it.
A dinner party given by Philip and his fiancée Celia (played by Anna Madeley who appeared in the 2005 London revival) brings together professors and graduate students, and one outsider, the egotistical novelist Braham, played with much flair by Jonathan Cake. However, Braham is a self-involved hedonist and predator. When he offers Celia a ride home, that gives man-eater Araminta (Jennifer Mudge) an opportunity to stay behind under the ruse that she will help with the cleaning up. Philip’s colleague and neighbor Don, a pleasant opportunist, (television star Steven Weber), leaves with the silent Liz (Samantha Soule). All of these pairings lead to unforeseen consequences that make up the action of this talky play.
In a role that made Alec McCowen a star in a precise and multilayered performance and would have been perfect for the late Peter Sellers if the play had been filmed, Broderick is completely at sea. Rather than playing a thoughtful intellectual who takes time before he speaks, Broderick plays Philip as though he were prissy. His stiff walk does not suggest moral integrity so much as a man with back trouble and his English accent sounds awkwardly placed. Given the play’s wittiest line, “I haven’t even got the courage of my lack of convictions,” Broderick gets no reaction from the audience.
Madeley’s Celia, who isn’t sure what attracted her to Philip in the first place, is rather unfocused and does not give a coherent performance as a woman only now making the discovery of what she really wants. Although Mudge ought to have no trouble with the obvious, voracious Araminta, she is unconvincing as if she did not believe in her own lack of morals. As Philip’s friend and neighbor, Weber is too bland to make any impression even when he denounces his own motives in the last scene. Soule as the totally silent Liz is given a few amusing facial expressions but fails to create a character with what little she has been given.
Only Cake (who is British) is able to spin a fully developed character as the egotistical Braham, but he seems to be in a different play from the other actors. Costume designer Tobin Ost has given him a 1970’s velvet three-piece suit with stripes in various shades of purple which is intended to show him as a male peacock. However, it is both distracting and too obvious for this devious character. Tate Ellington appears as a college student in the opening scene but his over emphatic performance lacks subtlety. For long stretches of the play, Grindley has the actors sitting around talking without giving them any stage business. This makes the play seem extremely flat when it should bubble with the effervescence of its clever lines and insights.
Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist may have dated badly in the forty years that have passed since it was written. In any case, its morality today seems curiously unpleasant even as a satire of a group of self-involved people. Director David Grindley has not served his cast well. In a role that ought to have fitted him like a glove, Matthew Broderick only demonstrates his limitations as an actor.
The Philanthropist (through June 28)
Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-719-1300 or http://www.roundabouttheatre.org
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