Sandra Oh makes a striking National Theatre debut in Martin Crimp’s hyper-contemporary updating of Molière’s comedy of manners. Alceste, the male aristocrat of the original here becomes Oh’s adamantine, Booker-winning novelist Alice, a stickler for emotional honesty until it comes to her untrustworthy movie-star boyfriend.
The star of Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy also has a host of stage credits in Canada and the US, and here she cuts a chic and diminutively commanding figure, mastering the playful rhythms and clever witticisms of Crimp’s rhyming couplets. Molière’s mockery of social hypocrisy is expanded to cover many ills of the modern world: online misogyny, grievance farming, the surrender of our privacy to Big Tech, people who give unwarranted standing ovations to plays.
