Timon of Athens
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

The hero of Timon of Athens (Other Place, Stratford-on-Avon) may be said to come in three sizes.

First, he is the feted spend-thrift, inviting all Athens to dinner, and sending every man home with a ruinously expensive present: the willing patron of every hack artists who knows how to turn a dedication. When his friends fail him, some dunning him for debts he has no means of paying and the other refusing to help tide him over, he becomes for a brief space an active avenger; though his revenge is mild by Jacobean standards- consisting as it does of throwing one final party in which the entire bill of fare is lukewarm water, served directly in the visitors’ faces- it is set of by yards of vituperative rhetoric. 

Apparently finding words more satisfying than action, Timon settles for them in the last long section of the play. Taking up residence in the wilderness, he looks for roots and finds gold. Word spreads and all his former acquaintances come to see him. They are told, at glittering length, to get stuffed. Nothing much actually happens, except that an army marches on Athens but decides at the last moment not to sack it, and that Timon himself abruptly dies.

All the action of the play is concentrated in the first half: most of the recognizable humanity as well. Timon’s banquets, the ebb and flow of creditors in his halls, the chat of servants deploring the avaricious ways of their masters, bustle with life. This play, presumably written in the wake of Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus has the same fearsome naturalistic energy contained within the disciplining form of verse. A technical advance on the overflowing prose of equivalent scenes in Henry IV, it is extraordinarily hard to bring off in the theatre. Either the form is softened of the content leaks away; we are left with the senseless spectacle  of (likelier nowadays) the husk of the dialogue, all moral but no meaning.

Ron Daniel’s studio production, lacking space and manpower, can hardly give us more than a diagram; with this year’s underweight (or at least under experienced) Stratford company, he misses out on much of the verbal colouring as well. Character contrasts are flattened out; the professional cynic Apemantus (deftly done by John Carlisle) emerges as a disinterested commentator rather than as a special form of parasite with an axe to grind. When Timon goes broke the atmosphere sharpens; his slippery friends are well contrasted, the scenes in which each tough bows out of his obligations coming over as sardonic comedy. An abacus, worked by each financier in turn, dominates the stage.

The final feast (I almost called it the last supper- a reference which directors have employed in other plays with less justification, but which Mr Daniels avoids) takes the pressure up further, and - against all the rules, since they merely repeat the same theme over and over- the wilderness scenes prove very fine.

They are played against a background of fishing-nets and jetties; Timon says that he will make his grave by the sea, and having spoken his last words, two scenes before the final curtain, he pulls a net over his head and, for the remainder of the play, just sits there. It is an oddly satisfying finish, lending the shape and definition to a play that could peter out, and Richard Pasco gives it the authentic accent of finality.

Mr Pasco is a sympathetic actor and I would have expected him to be happiest in the hospitable early scenes- where in fact, he misses the hectic size of Timon’s bounty. But he has the measure, if not quite the pulse, of the avenging Timon, and he discovers not only force but variety in the last phase.

He even finds enjoyment; this Timon gets a kick out of painting his face and discomforting his second wave of flatterers. And he preserves a thread to the earlier scenes by suggesting that Timon is a disappointed idealist. His credo- ‘I am Misanthropos and hate mankind’ - is delivered with his eyes rolled towards Heaven; ‘what wouldst though do with the world?’ Is a genuine helpless question.

He cannot though, actually explain the part of the play. We never get an insight into Timon’s mind until his mind has begun to go, never discover what fuelled his early recklessness. Hence the unending debates as to whether the play is satiric comedy or tragedy; it changes gear halfway. We look first at the hero, then with him, and the two viewpoints are never reconciled.

Cleary Shakespeare enjoyed pouring out misanthropy, and we can enjoy listening to it, but it is no wonder the play comes to a dead stop. Every one of Timon’s themes are more roundly and inclusively treated elsewhere: ingratitude in King Lear, superhuman generosity in Antony and Cleopatra, exile in Coriolanus. Even Timon’s sexual disillusions (directed at a couple courtesan, presented here with generous décolletage) merely scratches the itch of Troilus and Cressida.