A Misanthrope: knockout satire of a horny and insincere Silicon Docks
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
There is no questioning where we are. In the bowels of a sheeny tech district, a star employee puts on a show for her office situationship, shimmying out of her underwear in front of him. Their lusty rampage through the workplace, throwing each other from desk to desk, ends with one lover reaching for something that epitomises hipster Dublin in 2025: a post-coital matcha tea.
In Sugarglass and
Smock Alley Theatre
's flooring adaptation, Molière's 17th-century comedy of outspoken aristocrats stirring trouble for posers in Paris salons has been fully vapourised, rematerialising in a Dublin of agonised Millennial love.
'Our merger is starting to feel laissez-faire / And that's more than this man can bear,' says Alceste, a company cynic played by
Matthew Malone
, asking his office hook-up for more commitment – and to stop flirting with other staff to get ahead. 'It's just marketing,' says Célimène, a company superstar about to launch a new AI platform, played by
Emer Dineen
. 'So, suck it up / And I'll not suck your rivals.'
READ MORE
Among the refurbishments in a playscript by industrious American playwright Matthew Minnicino – painstakingly refashioned to fit the Silicon Docks – is the original comedy's 17th-century vogue of rhyming couplets, chiselled here into new lines that are head-spinningly impressive.
When Malone's Alceste vents about a HR complaint by an impressively brawny enemy (Matthew Tiente as an office snake dressed up as a bruh), he leans into rhymes that are funnily cruel. 'His rotundity is up to him / Though it's not that hard to switch to skim.' Sick burn!
Dineen's Célimène is a star on the rise but she isn't as untouchable as she thinks. Two tech bros are given their required slime by Naoise Dunbar and Adrian Muykanovich (One of them drools over his own bicep: 'How can one so majestic be abashed? / When I went on Tinder / It crashed.'). Upon realising she's played both of them, they decide to sabotage the launch of her new AI platform.
Bringing up the rear is a hateful office prude, who, in Fiona Bell's expert performance, becomes near-orgasmically breathless during a report to Alceste that his friend with benefits is cheating on him – prompting Malone, a performer as wiry as a young Richard E Grant, to lean into the ferocious end of his range.
Minnicino's inventive playscript allows director Marc Atkinson Borrull, after a streak of respectably intimate productions, to return to the wildness of his 2012 debut All Hell that Lay Beneath. (Astonishingly, Minnicino has rhymes to burn. 'Where did we last meet?' a performer whispers to me in the stalls, 'Was it in the Maldives / Where you said I looked like Keanu Reeves?').
Notably, when ambushed during her launch, a leaked voice note allows Célimène to stray from the 'rotten rhymes' of Molière's scheme, and unmask a world-saving tech company as a toxic culture of exploitation and pay-offs, without having to satisfy people – or metre. Telling the truth gets you in trouble in A Misanthrope. You can try to take others down with you.
A Misanthrope is at
smockalley.com
until August 2nd
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