Hunter impresses in Shakespeare’s timely satire on greed culture
Timon of Athens RSC Swan, Stratford upon Avon
It’s 30 years since the actress Kathryn Hunter – born in New York, raised in England – first elicited awestricken excitement. As a key member of Théâtre de Complicite (as it was then called), she came into her own during a production of Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, playing a millionairess who returns to her hometown, proffering wealth in return for the elimination of the man who once jilted her. Impish but indomitable, monstrous yet fragile, and with a voice that had a 50-a-day rasp, she went on to win an Olivier award.
Now, here she is on the RSC Swan stage, in a Shakespeare play (very possibly co-written with Middleton) that puts her in the role of another fabulously wealthy individual. As a gender-switched Timon of Athens, she’s sweetness and light to begin with, bestowing her bounty on all and sundry. The murderous instincts kick in later when, debt-ridden but with no help from erstwhile friends, she heads out of the city and into wild, railing misanthropy.
It’s a work that speaks to the age of austerity. Simon Godwin’s production ups the relevance by giving events a Greek-ish accent – with music, song and a flourish of tabletop dancing. There’s a nod to recent events over the Channel, too: the followers of the rebel Alcibiades wave placards and sport gilets jaunes.
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. In a bling dress that wouldn’t look out of place in Trump Tower, Hunter struggles to look at ease around her banqueting table, and some of the supporting players take ownership of the verse in the manner of people getting inside a new car, tentative and over-admiring of the basics.
Around the point when Timon rumbles the fickleness of her entourage, inviting them to a feast in which she heaps them with scorn and spatters them with blood, things start cooking. There’s a fierceness to Hunter in full flow. She has a martial precision to her gestures that makes her hypnotic: by turns comic and terrifying, like a demanding baby.
Where Simon Russell Beale took on a splenetic magnificence in Nick Hytner’s 2012 National revival, Hunter – reduced to meagre white rags – taps the philosophically enriching aspect of desolation, her croaky delivery teeming with sorrow.
“Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat thy gravestone daily,” she says, before heading into darkness, lugging planks on her shoulder and with leaves in her hair, like a memory of Christ. A parable for our times, then, and perhaps a nifty touchstone for spiritual renewal amid the rampant materialism of the year’s end.