Timon of Athens
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Simon Godwin
Designed by Soutra Gilmour
Music by Michael Bruce
Royal Shakespeare Company
Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
Friday 14th December 2018, 19.30
CAST
Salman Akhtar – Lucillius, Timon’s servant
Sagar I M Arya – Painter
James Clyde – Sempronius, Timon’s friend
Anton Cross – Caphis, a creditor / 1st thief
Ralph Davis – poet
Patrick Drury- Flavius, Timon’s steward
Ross Green – Merchant / Varro, a creditor
Nia Gwynne- Apemantus, a philosopher
Zainab Hasan – Jeweller / Hortensia, a creditor / 2nd thief
Kathryn Hunter – Timon
Debbie Korley – Alcibiades, a revolutionary
Rosy McEwan – Flaminia, Timon’s servant
Sam Pay – Ventidus,Timon’s friend / Philotus, a creditor / 3rd thief
Riad Richie – Servilius, Timon’s servant / Titus – a creditor
Imogen Slaughter – Lucia, Timon’s friend
Vivienne Smith – Isidopre’s Servant / Timandra / Erini
David Sturzaker – Lucullus, Timon’s friend
Edmund Wiseman – Demetrius, a senator
All other parts played by members of the company
MUSIC
Dunia Botic – voice
Rela Spyrou – Clarinet / saxophone
Nick Lee- guitar / bouzouki
Alexis Babea – double bass / electric bss
James Jones – Percussio
Jack Hopkins – keyboard
The Swan has much of the support cast sharing three T’s in late 2018 … Tartuffe, Tamburlaine and Timon of Athens.
Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare’s least popular plays, though chronologically it sits between King Lear and Macbeth, the consensus dating it to1606. Shakespeare was not at his most cheerful around the time. Othello was just before King Lear. There is no contemporary record of performance, and it appeared in the First Folio. Scholars think it either an incomplete text or an unfinished one.
Kathryn Hunter as Timon in the first part
Briefly, Timon is a patron of the arts, a generous giver to all who need help, and feels surrounded by friends. Timon throws lavish banquets. The money runs out. The friends all decline to help. Timon invites them to dinner and in the text, serves them stones and water.
The philanthropist becomes a misanthropist and retreats to a cave in dire poverty. Then, digging for roots, Timon discovers a chest of gold. The news spreads, people come flocking to scrounge or steal some, reinforcing the misanthropy. Meanwhile, Alcibiades, a soldier, leads a group of people wanting to overthrow Athens and is encouraged by Timon.
I’ve only seen it once before, and that was the highly acclaimed 2012 National Theatre production, directed by Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell-Beale as Timon. At 35% of the lines in the play, Timon has the highest percentage of lines of any Shakespearean character in a single play. Others have more actual lines, but Timon (uncut) grabs the greatest percentage.
Kathryn Hunter as Timon, Patrick Drury as Flavius, her faithful steward
Here they’ve made Timon female, Flaminus is female, and added the philosopher Apemantus as female too. More surprisingly, the soldier Alcibiades is cast as female. While I have issues with casting female actors as men in major male roles (gender blindness), I don’t have the same argument with simply saying “Timon is female.” After all, Timon is unmarried, has no relationships with the opposite sex in the play. Going in, I’m hoping that the RSC is not following the Globe’s current “All Girls Grammar School Sixth Form Play” style.
Dinner with friends
There is a welcome return of the RSC pre-show activity, setting the table, doing Greek waiter dances and chatting about the menu to the front rows. Lavish gold costumes and lots of changes make such a change compared to The Globe’s dull dusty blacks. (Let’s stop comparing.)
When you’ve got friends …
It’s a very directed production, lots happening between lines, intercutting, line shifting. Lots of very good Greek influenced music and singing. It generally looks marvellous. A major innovation was that here Timon served bowls of steaming blood rather than water and stones, then threw blood over everyone’s white costumes, and had his servants hose them down. That’s a major job for the laundry department at the RSC. More dramatic than stones, to the same purpose. The King’s Men couldn’t have cleaned the costumes in 1606. After a Trafalgar Studio Richard III where the audience was liberally spattered with stage blood, I am wary of blood being chucked about, and as I was in the second row, I carefully moved my jacket from my lap to behind me. No worries. The RSC are more careful than the Trafalgar Studio.
The blood’s coming – and on such lovely white costumes too.
Kathryn Hunter is tiny, with a deep guttural voice. She looks very Greek, and has Greek ancestry. She was very good at portraying the grande dame effect when Timon was still rich. I met enough rich and / or ‘important’ Greeks- in my travels to recognize the “patronizing” style. On the other hand, Shakespeare (with the help of Thomas Middleton, they say) and his sources probably knew absolutely nothing about Athens.
The servants of Timon with T-A badges. Salman Akhtar as Lucillius, Rosy McEwan – Flaminia, Riad Richie – Servilius,
There’s a fine supporting cast, most of whom we’ve seen this season. Nia Gwynne adds a Welsh accent to the philosopher and I don’t know why it works so well, but it does. Patrick Drury is a fine white haired steward, trying to save Timon from herself. Ralph Davis and Sagar I M Arya as the Poet and the Painter are a good comedy double act– their costumes are especially good, and I loved the “painting.”
Sagar I M Arya as the Painter
Then the trio of friends who reject Timon’s pleas are excellent – James Clyde as Sempronius, David Sturzacker as Lucullus and Imogen Slaughter as Lucia. We especially liked Rosy McEwan as Flaminia, servant to Timon.
The protestors. Timon in the pit. Vivienne Smith with crossed gun belts as Timandra (the whore), Debbie Korley in leather jacket as Alcibiades, the leader.
Obviously, the Greek financial crises of recent years makes current Athens an apt setting, including the rioting protestors. Here, Alcibiades’ army have become anti-capitalism demonstrators with anti-usury signs, and have the gilets jaunes, yellow hi-vis jackets, of the current French protests, which started after the play mainly. But I’d think if it as more universal. They reinforce the tenuous Greek link with the Greek music.
Kathryn Hunter as Timon in the second part, digging for roots
Kathryn Hunter is also very dramatic and actorly in gesture- obviously theatrical. She focusses on arm waving rather than line delivery. A powerful presence, and always fascinating to watch, though we both felt that she got a Timon more full of self-pitying tragedy in the cave scenes, rather than the intensity of the burning malice against mankind that Simon Russell-Beale projected so much better in 2012.
There are changes. Antony Burgess makes much of the venereal disease speeches (Timon wants revenge on Athens by spreading syphilis)and suggests it’s biographical, hence the gloomy nature of Lear and Timon. Stanley Wells in Shakespeare, Sex And Love follows the same theme.
Paul Schofield made an observation:
I came … at long last to find in it the knife-edge pain of betrayal which Shakespeare must have experienced as keenly as did his hero … I began to play Timon … as Shakespeare himself. Introduction to Folio Society edition, 1976
Timon finishes the first half with a diatribe against Athens, which is Act IV Scene 1 in texts … the Act and Scene division in plays dated before pre-1608 plays was imposed by later editors, and it is a natural interval point. According to Stanley Wells (above), both sciatica and leprosy in the diatribe mean ‘syphilis.’ It’s from Greek ‘hip pain’ so a euphemism, though nowadays sciatica refers to a nerve pain in the upper leg. I say this having been complaining about sciatica in public hearing the afternoon before the play!
There are two whores in the original text, Timandra and Phyrnia (labelled in older editions as ‘mistresses to Alcibiades’). Here they’re reduced to one. Timon sees the whores as the means for spreading syphilis Though she’s wearing a skirt, Timandra has crossed gun-belts (none of the other protestors do at this point, though they’re armed with guns later). There is no siren seduction. I thought they had deliberately downplayed the sexuality of the scene. On the other hand, commentators on the play probably overstate it, as the juicy bits make more interesting reading. Obviously, a female Timon changes reactions to the whores, but I guess they could have had a couple of male Chippendales types in posing pouches.
It made me wonder. I was thinking they had cast Kathryn Hunter for her unusual style and built the production round her, and then, having done so, thought they could just as easily have several other roles as female. The “de-sexualizing” the whore scene made me suspect a feminist agenda rather than casting a charismatic actor who happens to be female.
I noted the website says the running time is 2 hours 10 minutes, plus 20 minute interval. The free cast list in the theatre says 2 hours 20 minutes plus 20 minute interval. The website is right – usually longer lengths are right when they differ. I made it more like 2 hours 5 minutes before curtain calls and charity appeal. Did they cut 10 to 15 minutes after rehearsals? If so, it was a good move. The second half of the play is extremely monologue biased, noticeably long, even with Simon Russell-Beale. I think they have cut a lot of Timon’s ranting here.
Overall? The pace, intercutting, and the amount of physical activity they found in such a wordy play on the page is highly commendable. A minor gripe was that the long dining table was set diagonally across the thrust stage, so that from all the stalls seats you lost some of the faces – from straight on, you lost Timon, though she circled the table enough to give everyone a view.
Timon of Athens is not among Shakespeare’s best plays (though far better than the three x Henry VI in my opinion). The lead role is arresting, but just a touch too theatrical for me, and her voice work is subservient to arm flailing. I liked the support actors much more.
Three stars seems low for a play where I was enthralled by brilliant direction, energy, design, lighting and music, but given the casting, I think it’s fair.
***
CHARITY APPEALS
There is a week when theatres collect money for retired actors charities. Fine. We hit it twice this year, and donated £5 each time.
This performance ended with a further appeal for HIV research. I don’t begrudge emptying my pocket of change into buckets held by actors at this time of year and we both did for this one, BUT isn’t it a tad arrogant to use a performance as a platform for a personal pet charity? I choose my charities, with childrens’ hospices right at the top. HIV research has received 4.6 billion dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It needs tons of money but is hardly under-funded and a few hundred pounds is a drop in the ocean (but would be major to a local childrens’ hospice). My point is the actors’ charities are one week and specialist. Fine. But are we to be asked for a different favourite charity every time we go to the theatre? We make regular contributions to the Ehlers Danlos Support for connective tissue disorders, but I wouldn’t dream of passing the hat around an audience after giving a talk on Language Teaching. OK, charity appeals are an area we dare not mention. But I just did.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
4 star
Michael Billington, Guardian, ****
Inevitably, it is a play of two halves: in the first the spendthrift Timon discovers the falsity of friendship and in the second turns into an hermitic misanthrope. The fascinating thing about Hunter is that she becomes more powerful as the play proceeds. For all the lavish banquets and Greek dances of the first half, I never thought she caught Timon’s use of wealth as a substitute for human contact. But she is brilliant once she becomes a squatter in a woodland rubbish-dump.
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Oddly, the production achieves the alchemical magic of turning a leaden atmosphere to theatrical gold the further it moves away from its initial opulence towards stripped-back desolation.
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****
Simon Godwin has taken exactly the right approach to this new production of one of the Bard’s most obscure, least performed plays. With a swashbuckling candour and refreshing energy, he’s filleted and reformed the piece as a brisk, no-nonsense crash course in straightforward storytelling.In this endeavour, he borrows heavily from more modern media: scenes are intelligently intercut in the style of a television soap; visual moments are lent filmic impact with some dramatic set dressing.
3 star
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Sunday Times ***
Let’s be honest, Timon of Athens is no one’s favourite Shakespeare play … yet Simon Godwin transforms a lacklustre lecture into a gripping theatrical experience. … Even this team can’t do much to stop the second half, when Timon turns embittered hobo, seeming dramatically inert. Yet what they can do, they do extremely well.
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, ***
Harsh and bitter, it’s a pendulum of extremes, with its vexing title character displaying none of the hard-won self knowledge on offer in its near contemporary, King Lear. While the material’s not optimum — and Shakespeare must share the blame with his collaborator Thomas Middleton — this supple, clear and fluid production from Simon Godwin, with its overtones of the recent rise and fall of the Greek economy, is. It serves sad notice of what a loss to British theatre Godwin will be when he shortly takes the reins at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC.
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ***
Godwin’s production, though slick, is also timid, particularly in the obligatory, awkward RSC mob scene. Having the rebels sport ‘gilet jaunes’ and bandoliers and make fist-in-the-air salutes feels superficial at best, crass at worst. Often the production seems driven more by aesthetic than emotional coherence.
Gary Naylor, Broadway World ***
I suspect that I shan’t be alone in being grateful for the opportunity to see a production of this rarely performed play – but once will be probably be enough.
no rating system given
Matthew Salisbury, Stratford Observer:
Which brings us to Timon himself. Or in this case herself. A diminutive figure, Kathryn Hunter still packs a presence and commands through an endless flow of windmill arms and physical posturing. Sadly it’s the delivery which jars. Line after line reduced to rasping three second bursts cuts right across the poetry and the sense. The renunciation rant at the close of her time in Athens is robbed of any progression or power by its being yelled into the middle distance. It’s a decent performance – occasionally brilliant – but what all this gender-changing and scattergun cultural referencing actually achieves is not that obvious.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG:
Several of the cast also appear in Tartuffe and in Tamburlaine in the Swan Theatre in the 2018 RSC Season
TIMON OF ATHENS
Timon of Athens, National Theatre 2012
SIMON GODWIN, Director
Twelfth Night, National Theatre 2017
Hamlet, RSC 2016
Richard II, The Globe 2015
Two Gentlemen of Verona, RSC, 2014
The Beaux Stratagem, National Theatre, 2015
Man & Superman, National Theatre, 2014
Candida, Theatre Royal, Bath, 2013
DAVID STURZAKER
Tamburlaine, RSC 2018
Nell Gwynn, Globe 2015 (Charles II)
Richard II – Globe, 2015 (Bolingbroke)
The Merchant of Venice, Globe 2015 (Gratiano)
The White Devil – RSC (Bracciano)
RALPH DAVIS
King Lear, Globe 2017 (Edmund)
Tamburlaine, RSC 2018
JAMES CLYDE
Tamburlaine, RSC 2018
Tartuffe, RSC 2018
King Lear, RSC 2016 (Duke of Cornwall)
Cymbeline – RSC 2016 (The Duke, Cymbeline’s husband)
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