Simon Callow has gathered some of the UK’s brightest young TV comedy stars for a new production that has been repeatedly staged with actors the wrong age.
The Inbetweeners star Simon Bird is to make his stage debut in Christopher Hampton’s 1970 comedy The Philanthropist, which Callow is directing. Alongside Bird will be his co-star from Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner, Tom Rosenthal, the Fresh Meat and Call the Midwife actor Charlotte Ritchie and Matt Berry from the IT Crowd and Toast of London. Completing the cast is model and actor Lily Cole.
It is a strikingly young and inexperienced cast for a play that over the years has featured actors including Simon Russell Beale, Alec McCowen, Edward Fox, and Matthew Broderick.
“It is not a risk but it is certainly a challenge – for them and for me and for everybody,” Callow said. “But I wouldn’t want to do anything which was not a challenge.”
Hampton’s play, written when he was 23, inverts Molière’s The Misanthrope and centres on an academic whose morbid compulsion to please everyone has the opposite effect.
Callow said Hampton had designated that all the characters be between 25-35 but the original production starred a 45-year-old McCowen in the lead role, a pattern repeated in subsequent revivals.
“If you think of them in the ages they are supposed to be, it becomes a different play,” said Callow. “It becomes a play about young academics, not necessarily entirely fixed in their ways and on the make in one way or another ... it makes a big, big difference.”
The play was Hampton’s first big hit. “It was a stonking success,” said Callow. “Christopher was 23 when he wrote it and I was 21 when I sat in the audience and watched it. He seemed like the writer for my generation.
“Here was something completely different, it was scintillating, fierce and extraordinarily funny but elegant in a way that almost none of Christopher’s contemporaries were writing.”
Callow said The Philanthropist was a new and unfamiliar play for much of the cast and that was a good thing. “It was really wonderful meeting them and they said: ‘Where has this play been all my life?’
“It is exciting for me because there are so many things for them to discover. They don’t come to it with weary brilliance but come to it in a terra incognita way.”
The casting is unashamedly aimed at attracting newer, younger audiences who will recognise, for example, Rosenthal from Plebs and Bird from The Inbetweeners. “One of the big hopes of this production is precisely to attract a younger audience,” said Callow. “Nonetheless, we are doing nothing to the play to bend it to the tastes of the audience. We just think that they will be delighted by it.”
The Philanthropist, Trafalgar Studios, 3 April to 22 July
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