Last night, Timon of Athens (Shakespeare, perhaps aided and abetted by Thomas Middleton) at the Cineplex in the National Theatre Live series.
I've never seen this play staged before. It's a rather rare bird, and now I can see why. The dramatic action of the first half simply dissolves into an impasse in the second half. Timon, the title and central character, ceases growing or developing, after his great disappointment -- he merely exists until he dies, and all attempts to reinvolve him in the world fail because he has determined to remain permanently outside human society, which has so brutally disappointed him. This doesn't make for great drama, as Timon has to keep delivering variants on the same bitter rant over and over for more than an hour.
Director Nicholas Hytner has made a brave decision to bring order to a rather disorderly script by setting it in London of 2012. This isn't the first time the NT has done this in their live-to-cinemas series (Dominic Cooke's Comedy of Errors a good example) but it does seem very much more to the point here. That is, in part, because of some rewriting to bring the text into line with the modern world, such as updating the amounts of money offered or changing hands.
But mostly, the play works in this form because it can indeed be read as a commentary on our materialistic society, where a person's worth is far too often measured by wealth and by material possessions. Timon's finds out what his "friends" are worth as friends the hard way, when he runs out of money and nobody can or will help him. Least of all his friends in this crisis is the selfish and vain young fop, Ventidius, who was rescued from debtors' prison by Timon. Ventidius makes a joke of his erstwhile benefactor's request; he is more attached to his wealth than any other character in this staging of the play.
In Hytner's staging, Timon becomes in the second half a street person with a shopping cart full of odds and ends, a suitable modern metaphor for the cave in the wilderness of the original script. The hidden stash of gold which he uncovers turns up under a sewer grating, another brilliant metaphor for the rottenness at the heart of modern materialistic society.
For me, one of the least satisfactory aspects of the play was the handling of the Alcibiades subplot. The entire sequence about the killing of a man by one of Alcibiades' junior officers, and the consequent banishment of Alcibiades by the Athenian Senate, disappeared altogether. While this certainly tightened up an overlong play, it also was done to allow for Hytner's special conceit of recasting Alcibiades as the leader of the play's version of the "Occupy" movement. Because that background scene was eliminated, this whole aspect of the play appeared to be stuck on, almost as if it involved characters borrowed from another play by the director. But more on that in a moment.
The stage must be dominated by the man who plays Timon, and the performance of Simon Russell Beale does all of that and then some. This man is a powerhouse actor, with a large voice and a large stage presence, which he uses to fine effect. All the same, some of his best moments happened when he became still and silent -- a menacing threat on two feet. In the long, wearying sequence of misanthropic rants that makes up the second half, he never once became boring, and that's a huge achievement in itself. Beale has been known to overplay a character by far (Sir Harcourt Courtly in London Assurance comes to mind) but here he remained firmly grounded at all times, convincingly portraying Timon's descent into madness and rage.
Three other actors served as main anchors of the performance. Deborah Findlay was superb as Flavia, the faithful steward, who continues to return to Timon in his misery. In this role she was low-key but powerful, her love and admiration for the master always to the forefront of her performance as she wearily fought off the importunities of Timon's creditors. As the cynical philosopher Apemantus, Paul Higgins provided a worthy foil to Beale's Timon, both in Act I when they fence verbally from opposite points of the compass, and in Act II where they find themselves on the same ground but Timon still refuses to admit their spiritual kinship. Ciaran McMenamin provided a striking contrast as Alcibiades with his Irish brogue, and created a strong impression in the last powerful moment of the play.
That closing was the one aspect of Hytner's staging that, for me, sent chills down the spine. Alcibiades and his "Occupiers" gather around a conference table in negotiations with the fearful Athenian senators, in a series of brief scenes like sound bites on the evening news. In the final scene, Alcibiades takes his seat at the centre of the table, briefly reads out the epitaph on Timon's grave, and then hitches his shoulders as if to say, "Now, let's get on with business." The revolt has been subsumed and absorbed into the system, and life goes on much as before. And isn't that what always ends up happening in real life?
I'm no friend of fancy directorial concepts that don't make any kind of sense. As I've said before, my first directing teacher (David Switzer) said that the essential tool for a director was to be able to recognize when your brilliant intellectual concept isn't getting across to the audience, and then GET RID OF IT! But this one did work, simply, powerfully, pointedly, and made the whole modern subtext of the play worthwhile. In retrospect, the whole show took on many additional resonances and dimensions as I thought it over in light of that final moment while driving home. Now, that's what really great theatre can do for you!
