Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (40 page)
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Authors: William Shakespeare
After a three-year respite Peter Brook returned to the theater to direct Jean-Claude Carrière’s translation
Timon d’Athènes
at the burned-out, dilapidated Parisian Théâtre des Bouffes-du-Nord in a
production that provoked strong critical response, in the first instance to the venue itself:
Clearly the Bouffes-du-Nord was the play’s natural environment. Following a fire, the theatre remained unused for 25 years—until Brook discovered it: a “lost” theatre for a “lost” play. Instead of reconditioning the building, Brook left it untouched—a scarred battered hulk. During the play’s run it was a cracked-mirror image of the depleted civilization depicted on stage.
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He created a circular acting area from what had been the front stalls: “Brook was obviously aiming at intimacy—and achieving it. In the first scene it was impossible to distinguish the actors (in relatively modern dress) from the spectators crouching around the edge of the playing area.”
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The houselights were kept up so that “All that harsh lighting and that conspicuous absence of décor were to form a harshly Brechtian background.”
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François Marthouret’s Timon was “very young and graceful and naively, smugly messianic in his philanthropy, [he] smiled his way through the early part of the tragedy with a beguiling benevolence: calm, clear-voiced and perfectly controlled. A radiant performance from an unknown actor.”
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The
New York Times’
critic commented that “For Brook, the play is really about the society, rather than about the men,”
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a view enhanced by the production’s “special features” as defined by Ralph Berry, such as the “oriental touches” and presence of “Arab culture” in the production, as well as the prominence given certain roles:
Apemantus is played by a black actor, dressed in the style of an Algerian labourer (say) from the poorer quarters of Marseilles. He implies a kind of Third World critique of Timon’s frivolity and extravagance; and to the last he has not time for Timon’s (equally self-indulgent, as he sees it) railings. Alcibiades’ part is projected with great force: he ultimately, is the symbol of the military
coup
which is the only resolution to the decadence and corruption of Athens. At the last Alcibiades, in dark blue dress uniform with a red cloak thrown over one shoulder, stands
against the bare concrete wall to deliver his final appraisal of the situation … It is a haunting final image to Brook’s fable for our times.
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In 1981 Jonathan Miller directed a version for the BBC Shakespeare. Filmed entirely in “vast studio sets,”
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Miller updated the play to:
Elizabethan times and costumed the men, entirely in black with white ruffs, as Spanish grandees at the court of Philip II of Spain. The set consisted of massive pillars, which reappeared in more stunted form in the second half, while Timon’s cave was like a Second World War gun emplacement with a blockhouse in the background.
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The majority of critics thought Jonathan Pryce “an obvious choice for the part of Timon”:
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“Timon’s snarling misanthropy … suits Mr Pryce’s style perfectly.”
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Stanley Wells, however, was less convinced, approving of the opening episodes: “Jonathan Pryce makes Timon young, courteous, self-effacing, touchingly naïve in the pleasure that he takes in pleasing,”
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but arguing that in the last acts “his anger and despair need stronger control over the eloquent language.”
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There was universal dislike of John Bird and John Fortune’s comic duo as Painter and Poet but praise for Diana Dors’s voluptuous Timandra and unqualified approval of Norman Rodway’s suave Apemantus and John Welsh’s “touching”
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performance as the faithful steward.
Simon Usher’s updated, pared-down version for the Haymarket Studio Theatre used only seven actors in total. With little textual cutting, minor roles were condensed in a stylized production that employed characters speaking in unison and music to underscore “choric and poetic moments.”
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Michael Langham returned to
Timon
and the Jazz Age in 1994, selecting it to open the third season of the National Actors Theatre in a production which “against all the odds … enthralls the Broadway audience.”
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Timon, “played expansively by Brian Bedford,”
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was intentionally modeled on Jay Gatsby (the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel
The Great Gatsby
). Brian Kulick’s 1996 production for the Public
Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park was described as “viewer-friendly” but offered “the feeling of an allegorical comic strip.” It was the “director and designers, whose inventiveness is prodigious, who are the stars here, not the actors.”
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Michael Cumsty’s Timon was compared unfavorably with Bedford’s two years earlier in which Timon’s “rose-coloured benevolence and black cosmic anger emerged as flipsides of a compulsive, childlike nature … in a performance [that] gave a credible personal center and … an emotional continuity to a rough-hewn fragmentary work.”
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In 1997 Penny Metropulos regarded the play as a “Shakespearean work-in-progress” and hence took a number of liberties with it in order to “fit the text to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival stage and find a straight storyline for her actors.”
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In her production at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008, dubbed by many a “sub-prime” version in its timeliness, Lucy Bailey didn’t take liberties with the text but directed her “highly compelling revival” with “a superbly reckless bravura.”
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Her idea of Timon was “to see this man-eating world in terms of carrion and their prey”: “I was very influenced by Hitchcock’s
The Birds
in this and I wanted to create this very frightening world of vultures. I also wanted to create a whole world of acting above the audience that would interrelate with them.”
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Her vision was realized by constructing
a net over the groundlings above which the cast, doubling as aerialists, swing and chatter and crouch and bounce, like birds of prey waiting for the first sniff of Timon’s exposed meat. Veering from a mad aviary to a mordant anus, the production shows the hero explicitly defecating and rubbing the runny result in the faces of the flattering Poet and Painter in a contemptuous Marxist gesture about the exchange value of money.
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Even those critics who didn’t care for the production felt, like Michael Billington of the
Guardian
, that “Bailey makes some good points.”
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The majority, though, were warm in their admiration, leaving one critic admitting that it “leaves you perversely wondering if Bailey’s revival isn’t better than Shakespeare’s play.”
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Shakespeare’s “Most Neglected” Play
The 1965 RSC program describes
Timon of Athens
as “one of Shakespeare’s most neglected plays”; other evaluations have been less diplomatically phrased. Although included in the First Folio in 1623, there is no evidence that
Timon
was known, printed, or performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. For centuries regarded as an unfinished draft, due to its internal inconsistencies, it is now accepted as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton.
The first English performance of the Folio text seems to have occurred in 1816; when the RSC produced
Timon
in 1965 the play had had only eight previous English productions of any significance in its 360-year lifetime. Since Barry Jackson’s unexpected and influential modern-dress production in 1947 (“a fiercely contemporary satire” in which Timon “took refuge in a desolate bomb crater overlooked by a threatening howitzer gun”),
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the production rate has increased—though not to a major extent, despite the play’s apparent relevance for our era. It is still very rarely performed.
The RSC itself has staged the play only three times—on the main stage in 1965 and 1999, and at The Other Place in 1980; to these should be added a rehearsed but canceled production for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1971. In the 2006–07 Complete Works season
Timon
was represented by a coproduction between the RSC and Cardboard Citizens, a company dedicated to theater work “with, for and by homeless and ex-homeless people.” This was performed in a new modernized version radically adapted for the company by Sarah Woods; it played very briefly at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust—an artistically exciting and appropriate collaboration, but not one that would increase the original play’s exposure significantly.
Although
Timon
is one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays, all the RSC directors have done a certain amount of cutting, and almost all in the same ways, removing minor characters such as the Fool and Page in the first half, streamlining the action heavily after Timon’s death.
Timon
is very much a play of two halves, with contrasting settings
and tone, “divid[ing] in the middle as symmetrically as the two halves of an apple: … one … sweet, the other worm-ridden and mouldy.”
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The second half is challenging to stage, as it is highly static, not much more than a litany of curses, with little development; Michael Pennington (who played Timon in 1999) commented, “The writing between the tirades is quite uneven and it is tempting to rearrange it … trying to impose a more obvious build.”
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In 1965 Schlesinger did exactly that, reordering the sequence of visitors so that the bandits followed Alcibiades, to be followed in their turn by Poet and Painter, then Apemantus, and finally Flavius and the Senators. This appears to have worked well: Gareth Lloyd Evans, writing in the
Guardian
, considered the experiment proved that “really intelligent minimal cutting and transposition of Shakespeare’s scenes do little harm.”
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In contrast, although Pennington and Doran did explore re-sequencing the episodes in 1999, finally “some scruple held [them] back, some sense that the jagged music of Shakespeare’s experiment might be more rewarding than [their] dull editing”;
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the script here remained unchanged and they did not regret their decision.
The RSC’s first production was directed by John Schlesinger, then known primarily as a film producer, and featured Paul Scofield as Timon; it also had unusual influence over future productions in that it included in minor roles both of the RSC’s future Timons, Richard Pasco and Michael Pennington. The music was written by well-known classical composer Richard Rodney Bennett; the season’s resident designer, Ralph Koltai, was responsible for set and costumes.
Schlesinger’s reading of the play was as satire rather than tragedy. He set out his vision at length in a program note:
At the start of Timon you watch a self-indulgent, decadent society, and at the centre of it a man, seemingly respected and loved, whose generosity is over-lavish. His friends deny him and he plunges into violent misanthropy.
But can a man who goes suddenly to such neurotic excesses of human loathing be simply a noble creature crushed by misfortune
and ingratitude? Nowadays it is common knowledge—and Shakespeare must have known it intuitively—that a man’s surface behavior is often the reverse of his true self.
Timon’s generosity is to me suspect. The only way I can make sense of the extreme plunge into morbid hatred is to suppose that the open-handedness of the first act is mainly a fantasy life which Timon subconsciously uses to suppress his real nature, his isolation and inability to make any genuine human contact. In the second act Shakespeare shows us not so much a man changed by misfortune as revealed by it.
I find the tone of the play ironic and critical, rather than tragic.
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The production was set in classical Athens, though the costumes also had a timeless quality to them, long robes and medallions combined with leather trousers and high boots for the soldiers—Milton Shulman mentioned “costume affinities with the North-West frontier.”
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The exiled Timon wore a long, stained shift, becoming increasingly filthy as Act 4 progressed—yet photographs also indicate a consistent upper-class arrogance of posture and expression in him throughout. This Timon was not one whose suffering reduced him to a beast.
The set was initially “gorgeously Oriental, evoking Babylon rather than Athens”
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with bold strong colors, “yellow, white and sharp blue,”
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before giving place to “the wasteland isolation of the
Waiting for Godot
landscape”
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—a central marble floor panel cleverly transformed into a large sandpit, Timon’s “cave.” Toby Young describes the play’s visual effect in some detail, highlighting the creative interaction between director, designer, and lighting designer, John Bradley:
[The production boasts] splendid sets by Ralph Koltai—his usual sliding blocks of coloured, textured masonry in the first act provide a feeling of the luxury of Athens: and in the second half, a sandy trench, a dead tree, and lighting that picks the characters out starkly against the black cyclorama behind. The big set pieces … are enlivened with ingenious inventions … [and] subtle touches, the beggars sitting at the corners
of the stage during the feasts, for example, or the figures that appear on the balconies to point the scenes (for example a clerk with an abacus when Timon’s accounts are in question).
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Reactions to the production were mixed. But although many of the minor reviewers were cautious, the mainstream critics expressed enthusiasm. Evans said the RSC had “resurrected
Timon of Athens
and brought it home in triumph”;
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Bernard Levin called it a “deep and moving tragedy … a long-under-rated play … [with] unsuspected depth”;
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Herbert Kretzmer commented, “The Royal Shakespeare Company have now added another splendour to a list already long with honours.”
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Penelope Gilliatt’s response in the
Observer
was more analytic but no less positive. Under the headline “A Triumph of Pessimism,” she asked: