Word: mccowen
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Venus's-Flytrap. Fittingly enough, Philip (Alec McCowen), the hero of The Philanthropist, is a philologist. In Act I, Philip is insouciantly embroiled in a drawing-room-cum-bedroom farce; in Act II, he is mournfully bogged down in a talky self-analysis of considerable pathos. This makes for a jarring discrepancy of mood without any compensating illumination of meaning. Act I is fun and naughty games. In it, Philip ends up in bed with a Venus's-fly-trap of a girl. His fiancée Celia (Jane Asher) pairs up with a cynical aphorist...
...Philip seems to personify a biblical adage in reverse. He cannot love his neighbor (or his fiancée) like himself because he does not love himself. Celia leaves him, which makes good sense but rather flat drama. What redeems the evening is McCowen's acting. He has a feel for the role that is as sensitive as a safecracker's fingertips. At one moment he is the bemused absent-minded professor, at another the twinkling champion of verbal pingpong, and at still another, an anguished human with a parched heart...
...glittering virtuosity, this performance is very close to those of Gielgud and Richardson in Home. The Queen has not yet dubbed him Sir Alec McCowen, but the theater has its own list of knights, and he is one of them...
...searching account of the philologist's quest for some spiritual anagram for happiness. Such ups and downs occur throughout the play. The ups are sufficiently impressive that it is hard to believe that the author, Christopher Hampton, is only 24. Yet it remains for a leading actor, Alec McCowen, to lift the production as a whole onto a plane of compelling theater...
...McCowen's philanthropist is a companion to Molière's misanthrope. Just as his philology leads him to like all words, regardless of meaning, his philanthropy leads him to like all people, regardless of individuality. In McCowen's characterization, the eager grin fades into a rictus of terror that others may not like him; the mildness is a mask for inadequacy. He is so nice that it hurts-himself and everyone around...