Sunday 4 October 2015

Stratford Festival 2015 # 5: The Karma of Greed

I doubt if the word "karma" was known in London in the early 1600s, but in its common use today it perfectly describes the moral lessons contained in Ben Jonson's comedy, The Alchemist.  Every single character in the play, in some way or other, gets roughly pulled up short on account of his or her own greed.  What's truly remarkable is that nobody, and I mean nobody, escapes unscathed.

Alchemy was a pseudo-science which claimed to be able to convert base metals into gold.  While it was a popular belief of the Middle Ages, and the belief still existed in Jonson's day, in practice it was less reliable even than a lottery ticket.  But that didn't stop serious thinkers and con artists alike from claiming that it was possible to achieve this strange goal.

Jonson's play takes as its point of departure an outbreak of the plague, a far-from-uncommon occurrence in medieval cities with their deplorable lack of public sanitation.  Since Lovewit, the master of the house, has shut up his house and left town to escape the plague, his servant Jeremy has joined forces with two other lowlifes -- con man Subtle and prostitute Dol Common -- to lure the gullible into the house and fleece them by a wildly diverse range of deceptive tricks.

Their "customers" run the gamut from an uneducated man trying to operate a shop through a couple of self-righteous Puritans to an egotistical man of means, but one and all fall for the various scams to which these pretenders subject them.  And in the end, the three tricksters each get what's coming to them as well -- and it isn't the proceeds of their con games.

This is an especially tricky play to stage well, perhaps the reason why it's not often produced.  The action becomes increasingly complex as the story unfolds, with the victims coming into the shysters' den in multiples, rather than one by one.  The contortions of trying to keep each gull in play while preventing them from seeing each other suggest a farcical treatment, and that has certainly been done.  But on the other hand, the script is emphatically verbose in a way that's needed in order to give depth to all the characters, and those lines really do have to be heard.  The clear delineation of the characters is essential for us to understand the increasingly contorted twists and turns of the plot in the latter innings.  I picture the script in my mind as being almost a rope with language tugging on one end and action pulling the other end.  Or, as another writer put it, the play actually has to proceed at two different speeds simultaneously. 

Stratford's current production of the play successfully solves most of these difficulties -- but not without getting into some other deadly traps that could easily have been avoided.  Director Antoni Cimolino and assistant director Graham Abbey have captured a good balance between the opposing forces of language and action.  Designer Carolyn M. Smith has created a simple environment defined by a sizable table at one end of the long stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre and a smaller reading desk at the other end, with a couple of branched candelabra to add a bit of height.  Upon these pieces of furniture appears a delicious assortment of beautifully conceived props: an alchemical book, a crystal globe, an orrery, a lantern, an elegant cushion which actually proves to be a hat, and on and on.  It sounds overly busy as described, but actually there is still more than ample room to move around -- and all the space does get put to good use.

That long, narrow arena stage really forces actors to keep moving so that all the audience in turn can see and hear what is happening.  This aspect of the show worked well.

The three con artists anchor the entire show, their convoluted trickeries providing the through line that the entire play runs upon.  Stephen Ouimette plays a gruff, even truculent, and definitely sloppy and slovenly Subtle (the alchemist of the title).  Jonathan Goad gives a multi-personable reading of Face, the trickster who is really Jeremy, the servant in charge of the house.  He appears by turns as several different people, and gives each one a convincing reality.  Brigit Wilson is a raffish Dol Common.  It's a testimony to the strength of her art that, although playing here a character very similar to her Bawd in Pericles, she comes across as a very different sort of person.  The Bawd was very businesslike, rough but brisk, but Dol Common plainly comes from a much lower and rougher-edged stratum of the world's oldest profession.  These three actors clearly capture the uneasy nature of the alliance that binds the unholy trio together in their pursuit of wealth.  The opening quarrel scene might soon be forgotten but whenever they are on stage together there's always an underlying edge of tension between them.

Among the rest of the cast, I especially enjoyed David Collins in the role of Lovewit, when he returns at the end of the play to discover the shenanigans that have been going on in his house.  Antoine Yared came across well as the naïve and suggestible Dapper.  Steve Ross is excellent as Drugger, the shopkeeper who desperately wants some extra help to succeed in his business.  Wayne Best is exactly what his character name says he is -- Surly -- and also gives a great performance in both physical and verbal comedy when he reappears disguised as a Spanish nobleman.  Rylan Wilkie roused plenty of hilarity as the young, impetuous Puritan Ananias while Randy Hughson struggled to control him as the older Tribulation.  Jamie Mac had a few good moments as Kastril, the young nobleman who wants to learn how to quarrel effectively, but at other moments his performance did become rather "stagey".

That was even more true of his sister, Widow Pliant (portrayed by Jessica B. Hill).  For whatever reason, this character was turned into a two-dimensional walking cartoon caricature -- certainly not a believable person for me at any rate. 

The other serious miscalculation occurred with the character of Sir Epicure Mammon.  This should rightly be one of the comic gems of the production.  Sadly, here too there was an element of caricature, and it arose from the costume.  It's all very well to suggest that this gentleman of means and leisure has ample wealth -- but was it really necessary to give him an ultra-ample doublet that would have fitted your average grizzly bear with room to spare?  That silly costume forced Scott Wentworth into ridiculous "stagey" business which detracted from his otherwise strong performance.  For anyone who has ever read a delightful book called The Art of Coarse Acting, that was exactly what was happening with Sir Epicure Mammon -- and with the Widow Pliant and Kastril too, come to that.  Actors of this quality do the audience no favour when they reduce their work, or are reduced, to that level.

So, what we had was a funny production of one of theatre's most incisive and surgically precise satires -- a production with many strengths that was sadly let down somewhat in a few key areas. 

No question about it, I laughed -- but there were also times when I found the show a good deal less than funny, and that should certainly not have happened!

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