Top cast announced for The Philanthropist comedy play
- Casting has been announced for comedy play The Philanthropist, directed by Simon Callow
- Matt Berry, Simon Bird, Lily Cole, Charlotte Ritchie and Tom Rosenthal will star
- The Philanthropist will run at The Trafalgar Studios in London from the 3rd April to 22nd July 2017
An all star cast has been announced for the new production of Oscar winner Christopher Hampton's most celebrated play, The Philanthropist.
Launching at The Trafalgar Studios in London in April, the production will be directed by Simon Callow.
The IT Crowd star Matt Berry, Simon Bird from The Inbetweeners, Lily Cole (St Trinian's), Fresh Meat's Charlotte Ritchie and Friday Night Dinner actor Tom Rosenthal will feature in the production.
The Philanthropist was first premiered at the Royal Court in 1970.
Set in a fictitious English University town, strongly evoking Oxford or Cambridge, the play follows 24 hours in the lives of a group of young academics. The action unfolds in the rooms of Philip (Simon Bird), the university's cosseted and floundering professor of philology, for whom solace and certitude exist in complex wordplay. Out in the 'real world' the Prime Minister and his cabinet have been assassinated and England's most treasured writers are being murdered one by one. Back in the cosy bubble of university life, the bachelor don anguishes over sex, marriage, anagrams and the meaning of life. Did someone suggest academics were 'out of touch'?
When Philip hosts a dinner party, joined by his stylish and perceptive fiancée Celia (Charlotte Ritchie), his worldlier best friend Donald (Tom Rosenthal), the seductive Araminta (Lily Cole), and the wealthy and egomaniacal novelist Braham (Matt Berry), the evening sets off a chain of events which puncture the rarefied and cerebral world they inhabit. The morning after, the group is left to wade through the emotional detritus and navigate the consequences of their actions.
The producers say: "A biting 'bourgeois comedy' and a fiendishly clever inversion of Moliere's The Misanthrope, Simon Callow's new production boasts some of today's most exciting young stage and screen actors."
Simon Callow says: "When Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist first burst onto the world, he was 23; the play was really about his contemporaries, but neither then, nor ever since, has it been cast at the right age. I'm very excited, not only to be doing the play, which I think one of the funniest, sharpest plays in the English language, but to be doing it with a group of brilliantly witty and original young actors who will reveal the play as it's never been seen before".
The Philanthropist will run from Monday 3rd April to Saturday 22nd July 2017 at Trafalgar Studios, with prices from £19.50. Tickets
In the below video, Callow and the cast talk about the play: