Greedy Greeks, huge debts... it’s a Timon for our times
Timon of Athens tends to be dismissed as one of Shakespeare’s clunkers. This production — at least its astonishingly topical first half — should correct that theory.
Timon is an extravagant leader of Athenian society. Well, fancy that. A profligate Greek.
Timon is surrounded by revolting flatterers. He is too big a borrower to fail. But fail he does, naturally, and when that happens, his former ‘friends’ disown him. He is Robert maxwell, Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, the European Commission, Fred Goodwin and more rolled into one.
Sir nicholas Hytner’s production sags after the interval, but the first half is fast, venomously satirical, as exciting an hour of theatre as you will see.
it attacks both debtors and irresponsible creditors (our minds may turn, perhaps, to the usurers who helped recent governments to build hospitals under the private finance initiative).
Timon splashes the cash around because he wants to buy power and love. He spoils his cronies. He has no family. His entire life is devoted to baubles and gaiety, as though he need never earn the money he spends.
The opening scene is one of those ghastly sponsor-garlanding evenings in a swanky art gallery — an Athenian Tate? — where Timon (Simon Russell Beale) is being honoured as a patron. This at a Royal national Theatre that accepts hundreds of thousands of pounds from a money-changing concern in the City!
WE SEE Timon’s false admirers being wined munificently at a long dinner table. They are given goodie bags, just as happens in corporate hospitality land. They are entertained by a balletic interlude that is fraught with ominous violence.
Timon’s steward (a man in the original but here played well by Deborah Findlay) ‘bleeds inwardly’ for her employer because she can see how fake these kestrels are. Hilton mcrae’s philosopher Apemantus reminds one of Jaques in As You Like it. He, alone, tells Timon to stop being such a fool.
Timon is eventually left ‘a naked gull’ when his banker friends call in the debts. Cue a striking backdrop of Canary Wharf. We later see a backdrop of Westminster. Sir nicholas may hammer home the message hard — here, he is saying, is a picture of London in 2012 — but i don’t see why he should not.
our so-called civilisation, with its mad Keynesianism, its cartwheeling public and private debt, its City crooks and thieving lawyers, its media liars, venal legislators and moronised citizenry, deserves a great boot up the backside.
The business of the rebel Alcibiades (Ciaran mcmenamin) is rather less gripping. The mob is unlikeable, grubbing around in the dirt for gold coins.
Some see this as an anti-capitalist play (marx admired it) but Shakespeare’s disgust is not narrowed. A simple anti-capitalist polemic would show somewhere the dignity of work. Here, everyone has been tainted by the idiocy of unfeasible debt.
Humanity receives a pretty poor report card from the Bard. He might not have been surprised by what has happened to Western Europe in recent years. mr Russell Beale, perfect as Timon in his deluded prime, is less suited — vocally, physically — to playing Timon in embittered poverty. He assumes a strange stoop and wears a woollen hat which makes him look like Compo from Last of The Summer Wine. no matter.
His raging speech against human nature which seals the first half could have been written since the banking crisis. if only the Governor of the Bank of England had read Timon a decade ago.
A VERSION of this review appeared in earlier editions.