The impotent don returns

Time and Simon Russell Beale have worked wonders on Christopher Hampton's finest play. Subtitled "a bourgeois comedy", its hero's humanity an antidote to the blistering invective of Moliere's Misanthrope, The Philanthropist has lost none of its satirical force since its 1970 premiere.

It re-emerges as a ravishing tragi-comedy of sexual manners and morals, in a world of cloistered university academics who gladly let the world of politics, with Prime Minister and Cabinet assassinated, pass them by.

I can hardly believe how moved, amused and overwhelmed I was by Russell Beale. After his matchless performances as Uncle Vanya and Malvolio, he plays another hopeless, hopeful romancer to the manner beautifully born.

He is Philip, a chronically polite and affable philology don, a man uneasy in his own skin and fearful of causing displeasure. Hampton makes him a fascinating psycho-sexual study with few equals in contemporary drama.

The part suits Russell Beale, who wears an expression of chronic anxiety, like a vocation. With what comic-pathetic sadness he lets a chance of happiness, in the shape of sexy Celia, slip through hands that shrink from any self-assertive utterance.

The final irony is that Anna Madeley's touchingly insecure Celia longs for Philip to express himself with the candour he dreads. The drama hinges upon Philip's disastrous, sex-trouble dinner party, an event whose mood could not be more Blairite 21st century.

David Grindley's production, which infuriatingly often keeps Russell Beale with his back to us, looks thoroughly 1970s. A famous novelist, Braham, whom Simon Day invests with needling malice and a plum velvet suit, announces his exchange of a Left-wing conscience for money-making cynicism as if doing the world a favour.

Braham briefly succeeds with his seduction of Celia. Siobhan Hewlett's sexual assault upon Philip, with Russell Beale's face comically conveying a fear and reluctance he is far too polite to voice, ends up a limp letdown. These two inter-related bedroom trysts leave Philip's marriage hopes on the rocks and when attempting to get his own rocks off, his fellow don (suave Danny Webb) stands in the way.

Russell Beale, growing quieter and cooler the more desperate his attempt to win back Celia, does something magically poignant. He makes Philip's weak, humane personality and psychological flaws the source of both laughter and fascinated sympathy.

The Philanthropist