If I had known that this 2026 rewrite of Crimp's 1996 and 2009 adaptations would centre around a social media misinformation scandal, I might have groaned. Not because the information crisis isn't the most pressing matter of the current moment, but for how much TV, film, and theatre, now spends preaching on this very point. This is where this iteration of The Misanthrope stands out, by climbing down from the pulpit. Alceste is now Alice (Oh), a successful woman author from America. Her confidant, John (Chahidi), in place of Philinte, is now a playwright who, by his own admission, writes "so-so" plays for mainstream audiences.
Too much talk of this production has made comparisons to Crimp's highly-regarded adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. This is not a stripped-back modern retelling; Robert Jones's set is a series of sumptuous true-to-today living rooms, that also draw a line directly from the 17th-century opulence Molière might have had a hand in making for Louis XIV, working for his father. Comparisons to Cyrano are as frustrating and unhelpful as those that dogged Suzie Miller last year between Inter Alia and Prima Facie; once you exclude that both protagonists are women working in law it's noticeably reductive to try to tie them together.
The 2026 production of The Misanthrope should be viewed with fresh eyes and out of the context of the writer's past (re)writing. Although it was director Indhu Rubasingham's suggestion to rewrite Alceste as a woman, Crimp admits, in the accompanying book, that his perspective on whether Molière was placing himself into the play was already evolving since his 2009 script. This adaptation runs deeper than it might be given credit for. It could be argued that Oh's character is now much closer to the genuine outsider that Molière - on account of his position serving high society - could never claim to be, and therefore Alceste never was.