Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (42 page)

11.
RSC 1980, directed by Ron Daniels. In contrast to 1965, both feasting and masque were dignified; “There is no riotous excess in this hushed, smiling ceremony”: Richard Pasco as Timon.

As Timon, Pasco had been an unexpected choice; Barber noted in surprise, “the role of literature’s most famous of misanthropes has gone to that most winning of actors, Richard Pasco.”
¹⁵⁷
However, both his verse-speaking and his interpretation won vivid and unqualified praise from almost all reviewers. Geoffrey Wheatcroft observed:

While Michael Billington commented:

Again the one note of criticism came from Warren, who pointed out, with justification, that “this suggested a Timon more at home with the middle of humanity” than with “the extremity of both ends.”
¹⁶⁰
His was, however, a lone dissenting voice, here explicitly contradicted:

Among the smaller parts, John Carlisle as Apemantus was much praised for his “lovely study … of a cool beaky professional cynic,”
¹⁶²
“faultlessly polite in the delivery of his endless discourtesies,”
¹⁶³
and Arthur Kohn for his “sturdy supporting performance … as Timon’s devoutly loyal steward,”
¹⁶⁴
while “Alcibiades’ parallel discomfiture at the hands of people he has served well [came] across with great force … James Hazeldine play[ed] the warrior with great finesse, an action-man alternative to Timon’s abrasively philosophical stasis.”
¹⁶⁵

Billington’s review concluded that the production “[made him] hope we do not have to wait until 1995 before we see [
Timon
] again.”
¹⁶⁶
In fact, despite the unequivocal success of Daniels’s production, it took even longer. It was not until 1999 that
Timon
was presented again, though this time it was back in the main house, after a gap of thirty-four years.

Gregory Doran has called
Timon
“the most contemporary of all Shakespeare’s plays using a mixture of cynicism, humour and harsh brutality … particularly resonant for us at the end of the 20th century.”
¹⁶⁷
Yet, as Michael Billington explained in the
Guardian:
“Doran holds this difficult play together … not least by suggesting that it is a moral fable about the court of James I in which conspicuous consumption is combined with a debt-culture and a gaudy, gay sexuality.”
¹⁶⁸
Nicholas de Jongh concurred: “Timon is surely a coded and pathetic version of [King] James, driven by an uncontrollable urge
to spend, spend, spend in all the wrong places and on all the wrong people.”
¹⁶⁹

Using this seventeenth-century context as a starting point, Doran and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis expanded outward eclectically. The costumes were “flamboyant classical-renaissance punk,”
¹⁷⁰
“gorgeous, often remarkably modern quasi-Jacobean attire,”
¹⁷¹
and the characters “fashion victors rather than fashion victims.”
¹⁷²
Settings revealed senators in Edwardian wing-armchairs (“great chairs of ease,” 5.4.11) beneath green glass lampshades; one false friend was wheeled on in an old-fashioned wheelchair; others were discovered in a modern sauna that yet had classical resonances. In this allmale society, the banquets had “a kitsch, high-camp quality.”
¹⁷³
The action unfolded to the accompaniment of a score by Duke Ellington, originally written for a Stratford Ontario
Timon
in the 1960s: this “edgy, evocative music”
¹⁷⁴
provided “passages of hot jazz luxury and softly aching blues,”
¹⁷⁵
while for Paul Taylor in the
Independent
, “the mockingly sleazy jazz underscore[d] … the trashy decadence” of Timon’s world, establishing a “droll satiric tone.”
¹⁷⁶

This bold interpretation and the unexpected juxtapositions found favor with the majority of critics: “All the joyous fascination and intrigue of a genuine rediscovery”;
¹⁷⁷
“A production bang on the money,”
¹⁷⁸
were typical responses. However, inevitably there were dissenters: Nigel Cliff in
The Times
complained that the production “play[ed] largely for laughs,”
¹⁷⁹
and the
Evening Standard
headlines were repeatedly critical—“Panto Arrives Early” in 1999;
¹⁸⁰
“Hippie
Timon
Goes Over the Top” in 2000.
¹⁸¹

Lewis’s minimal set consisted mainly of a large planked disc. At the back, a brick wall with an immense central door dominated most of Acts 1–3, though for the banquet sequence glittering drapes in dark rich colors hung swathed across the stage, lit by fire bowls and flickering torches, with the feasters seated on informal benches at low tables. Cupid was flown in on a harness, shooting at Timon with a trick arrow; the drapes were then drawn back to reveal a carefully posed stage tableau—two Amazons on pedestals, two more seated on flown trapezes, with Cupid forming the triangle’s apex. Costume here consisted merely of “thongs … little black masks and large white feather wings.”
¹⁸²
Far from being a masque of women, these
were clearly men in drag and the dance provocatively homoerotic, the sexual tension leading finally to fighting.

The second half was bleak and exposed. A giant orange sun with an eclipsed moon at its center hung over an empty stage, where a few planks had been roughly levered up to reveal a rectangular pit, which, as in 1965, became Timon’s “cave.” This, however, was far more makeshift than its 1965 equivalent, and much smaller; it became gradually obvious that Timon had dug his own grave. The action here was played as a single unbroken continuum up until Timon’s death, with Timon himself scarcely stepping out of the pit. He was initially “near-naked and defenceless, terribly burned, dehydrated and vocally cracked,”
¹⁸³
consumed by a violent anger. However, Flavius’ visit enabled him to weep, be held, and trust (marginally) again; thereafter he gradually reached a calm which allowed him to die in some peace at the end. The final sequence was triggered by blood-red lighting and smoke pumped forcefully across the stage as Alcibiades descended from above on a lighting bridge, negotiating with the Senators from a great height. His promise of mercy, received initially with relief, was qualified by his agreement to punish only the “enemies of Timon’s and mine own” (5.4.65); those onstage suddenly registered that they themselves all fell into either or both of those categories. The closing tableau showed “Alcibiades above, the Steward centre stage and Apemantus downstage by the proscenium wall … a silent triptych of Timon’s friends, widely separate, each … remembering Timon in his own way.”
¹⁸⁴

These three minor roles were all strongly played. John Woodvine as Flavius was far more prominent than most stewards, bringing on Timon’s epitaph at the end, for instance, and holding the play together with “steely and compassionate stoicism.”
¹⁸⁵
Rupert Penry-Jones was a young, blond, and ruthless Alcibiades, who “clearly indicate[d that he would], like Augustus Caesar, end up in total fascist control of a city-state that ha[d] gone soft round the edges.”
¹⁸⁶
“The most eye-catching performance came from Richard McCabe, whose Apemantus, in shabby 20th century gear … provide[d] a droll running commentary … setting the comic tone for the production.”
¹⁸⁷

Timon himself was played by Michael Pennington, stepping in halfway through rehearsals to take over from a sick Alan Bates. His
was an immensely successful bravura performance, summed up by Alastair Macaulay:

Paul Taylor analyzed the performance further:

Pennington himself would have agreed with this assessment; he described the play as “a subtly sardonic satire … [and] its central character a fascinating study in benevolent neurosis … [with] a narcissism that holds human contact at bay by wildly parodying it”; like Penelope Gilliatt in 1980 he also found himself unexpectedly “exhilarated” by “Timon’s benighted ecstasy.”
¹⁹⁰

Charles Graves, reviewing the 1965 production in the
Scotsman
, provided a perceptive, balanced, and still partly relevant explanation for
Timon
’s infrequent staging, though it is worth reiterating here that the play is no longer regarded as an unfinished work, but a collaboration with Thomas Middleton:

Despite all this, critical reactions to productions of
Timon
have repeatedly expressed high levels of praise for the play in performance, and surprise at the degree of neglect it has suffered. Its themes continue to speak to the twenty-first century and it has been proved to work as both tragedy and satire; it seems appropriate to close by paraphrasing Billington and hope we will not have to wait till 2033 before
Timon
is seen on the main stage again.

However, the final word should go to James Fenton, who concluded his 1980 review in the
Sunday Times
, “The production left me with a feeling of intense and abiding excitement, mingled with an indefinable frustration. Not an inappropriate response, when I thought about it, to an unfinished work of Shakespeare.”
¹⁹²

Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his
Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His 1999 RSC production of
Timon of Athens
starred Michael Pennington as Timon and transferred to the Barbican the following year.

Timon
’s
not an easy play and not one of Shakespeare’s most popular; what was it about it that attracted you? Do you think it could be said to have contemporary relevance and did you try to capitalize on that at all?

GD:
It wasn’t, as it is with some plays, an immediate instinct that this play grabbed me in a visceral way. Having by that point in my career done both
Titus Andronicus
and
All Is True/Henry VIII
I found it really interesting looking at Shakespeare plays which didn’t have a huge back-catalogue of performances, where you weren’t weighed down by precedents quite so much as you can be with the more familiar plays. With Shakespeare, to some extent, you cannot do it in isolation; you are always in some sense doing it in reaction to other productions you’ve seen. There was something about tackling uncharted territory that was interesting and had proved fruitful. I had seen Trevor Nunn’s production at the Young Vic with David Suchet as Timon, and I’d seen Jonathan Pryce do it on the TV as part of the BBC Shakespeare series. The brilliance of Trevor Nunn’s production, which had set the second half in a junkyard of crushed cars, was to place the play very directly in the modern world and to point up its relevance to the prevailing obsession with banking and money. I wanted to retain the play as a metaphor. In other words, as Shakespeare chooses the metaphor of ancient Athens to talk about his own world, I didn’t want to put it into modern dress because I thought that pointing out the parallels might deny a more universal resonance.