Theatre 2
Timon of Athens (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford)
Rout of the world
Patrick Carnegy
The RSC rounds off what's been a strong season with Gregory Doran's arrest- ing production of one of Shakespeare's most uncomfortable and seldom-given plays. Timon of Athens, we just about remember, is the one about the man who spends the first half of the play as a munifi- cent philanthropist and the second as a beggared misanthropist.
It was clever to have paired it in reperto- ry with Antony and Cleopatra for the plays are proximate in Shakespeare's output. In both the hero's downfall is triggered by a fatal lack of judgment, Antony's unhinged by infatuation with Cleopatra, Timon's by intoxication with his wealth's power to draw friends. It would have been fascinat- ing to have seen both roles played by the same actor, Alan Bates, as was originally planned. But Bates withdrew from Timon due to a chest infection and Michael Pen- nington has stepped into the breach. Always an intelligent and energising per- former, he revels in a great role that is thirsty for those very qualities. On the page Timon seems near-impossi- ble to play. The text itself is fractured, the words, like Alcibiades's wounds, seem to `ache at you'. Timon's farewell to the world is a plague upon all communication: 'LiPs: let four words go by and language end - Pennington animates the end-game of this most extreme and bleakly prophetic work of the Bard, prefiguring so much of Beckett and modern apocalyptic apprehension, with surges of vindictive but always buoyant humour. Already in his phase of indiscrimi- nate largesse, Pennington's Timon is psY' chotic in the need to please, his self-esteem floated on the bubble of his spongers approbation. This, as his disregarded alter ego Apemantus has it, is a man `to counsel deaf, but not to flattery', his tragedy that 'the middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends'.
The wild inspiration of the bankrupt Timon's valedictory banquet at the end of the first half gives Pennington his strategy for sustaining the outcast Timon's progress through the desert wastes of the second. At this banquet he chastises his 'knot of mouth-friends' by serving them nothing but water, smoke and stones. Pennington carries the manic jocularity through into the second part, this time deliberately using the gold he's so improbably mined in the wilderness to complete his rout of the world. It is, he's discovered, a blight upon humanity and not a blessing. Those whom he seeks to punish with it are carica- tures of avarice and ingratitude, all played with admirable flair in Doran's pro- duction.
To the great benefit of the first part, Doran resurrects Duke Ellington's music for Stratford Ontario's modern-dress ver- sion of 1963. It underwrites the mood of Timon's spending spree and is perfect for the entertainment at his lavish first ban- quet. Here, as you might expect in a Doran production, the 'masque of Ladies as Ama- zons' is one of handsome young warriors in drag-armour, if you can imagine such a thing. This is by no means unreasonable, as homoerotic threads are woven through the fabric of this 'Greek' play; women feature only as dancing partners or whores (praised by Timon for making no bones about serv- ing base man's baser appetites).
After the interval, there's nothing but the bare boards of the huge oval floor, a waste- land under a mourning sun. The refuge of the vagabond Timon is a pit at the very front of the stage in which he's digging for the roots of reality and is patently his expectant grave. No music here, save the jests of Timon's black Sermon on the Mount, his comminations of man for his very existence.
It's a palpable weakness of the play that Timon has nothing much to run up against except himself, but John Woodvine invests the figure of his faithful Steward with real presence. Richard McCabe is wonderfully entertaining as Apemantus, the cynic who hangs around to relish the spectacle of Timon making an ass of himself. At the Amazonian junketings, McCabe, in shades and fingering a keyboard, hurls his miked commentary into the audience. It's certain- ly a startlingly new take to find 'Men shut their doors against a setting sun' put across as a crooned lyric.
No lack of humour, either, in Apeman- tus's visit to Timon's bunker — his suntan lotion and carefully placed towel suggesting that even misanthropes have to look after themselves. Doran does his best to clarify the awkward sub-plot of young Alcibiades as the avenger of Timon's wrongs, but could have encouraged Rupert Penry- Jones to summon up at least a little of the fire he brings to his rivetting Don Carlos in Schiller's play at The Other Place just along the road.
But all in all, this is a superb staging of Timon, with Pennington finding far more in the central role than you'd have imagined and compelling you to face it. Doran's pro- duction digs deep into the roots of Shake- speare's merciless exploration of the darkest side of human nature. If you think of Lear as the furthest frontier, think again.
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