Timon of Athens
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Would you prefer a timely Timon or a timeless Timon? Both are on offer in the new production at Stratford, one on each side of the intermission, and both are riveting, the first perhaps more than the second. The disjunction is not the fault of the production; it's built into the play, one of Shakespeare's least seen, possibly written in collaboration and almost certainly unfinished.

Timon of Athens starts as a satire, one that can tilt either toward comedy or tragedy. Timon is a rich man and a compulsive giver. All Athens flocks to his house, to flatter him and suck him dry. He ends up ruined, and finds not only that his former friends refuse to help him out but that, somehow, he owes them money and they are dunning him for it.

As another poet was to put it, nobody knows you when you're down and out. Timon, having discovered the truth of this, proceeds to live it. He betakes to the woods and becomes a hermit, living on roots and spewing vitriol at all who visit him -- a company that, for one reason or another, includes nearly everybody who was a part of his former life. His bitterness is unrelenting; the only thing that cheers him up is the prospect of his hometown being destroyed by the army of Alcibiades, a military hero who also feels ill- treated by the powers that were.

The play's first half is all bustle and chatter, its second all stasis and diatribe. Its hero stands an equal chance of being cut in two, but the great triumph of the Stratford production is that Peter Donaldson's Timon is believably the same man throughout. He is a rugged actor, hardly one of nature's golden boys, which makes the glass- smooth composure of his prosperous days seem all the more impressive. There is a force to this Timon's benevolence, a sternness, a point-blank refusal to believe that life could ever be anything other than what he wants it to be. You feel that none of his beneficiaries would dare refuse his bounty, even if they wanted to.

When bankruptcy threatens, he positively exults in the thought of how happy they will be to show their gratitude. Flying so high, and with so much power in reserve, he can only be in for the most tremendous crash. Usually it's an instant reversal, but Donaldson cunningly contrives a transition. Stumbling out of Athens, he turns to curse the place, and can hardly believe what he's saying. He has to fight, not to find the words, but to force them through his lips. Later, of course, the dam having burst, they will flow unstoppably.

Stephen Ouimette, the director, much aided by his designer, Lorenzo Savoini, sets the play now and, very possibly, here. For the first half, which looks white and luxurious, it works brilliantly. The senators of Athens, who seem also to function as its bankers, are for the most part a collection of bloodless veterans, but their leader (Robert Hamilton) is young, a Bay Street high flyer in request at all the best parties. Those bashes are especially well staged. Ouimette, who made his directorial debut a couple of years ago with a Threepenny Opera that was terrible but talented, here makes good on that scattered promise.

There is wit in the way Timon's friends lap up his feasts, greedily appraising the cuisine, and even in the way his servants stand behind the guests' chairs. The various lords, sketchy in the text, are thoroughly and consistently individualized, never more so than in their responses, clumsy or lascivious or both, to the dancing hookers (a masque of Amazons in the original) sent to lure them onto the floor. Their apogee comes when they severally weasel out of their obligations to their benefactor. Each scene gets special treatment. Lucullus (Ron Kennell) is ferrety and implacable, sipping wine as he holds forth on the ways of the world. Lucius (Robert Persichini) is smooth, blubbery and evasive. We catch him at the beauticians', removing the cucumbers from his eyelids to stare incredulously at the messenger come to inform him that Timon is broke. Finer still is the scene in which the flatterers convene at Timon's last banquet, convinced he has been having them on, and wondering what delicacies he has in store for them this time. They are wonderfully shameless.

These scenes could have been written yesterday. The later ones could have been written at any time; they seem to have been sculpted out of rock. Here the modern dress begins to outwear its usefulness - - a wilderness, after all, is a wilderness, whatever the period. This section is hobbled also by the consistency of Timon's invective, which is magnificent but monotonous. He takes on all comers but gives each much the same treatment. Even his faithful steward (a heartfelt performance by Bernard Hopkins, though more commentator than character) is excused from the general curse on the strict condition that he prove the only honest man.

The character who survives best is Apemantus (Tom McCamus), the cynic/philosopher, who haunts Timon's prosperity with unheeded good advice, ostentatiously swigging Evian while everybody else knocks back the Chardonnay. In this 21st-century world, he looks like a remnant of the 1950s, with specs and cap and a satchelful of Sartre. Visiting Timon in his cave, he arrives by bike (sans crossbar) to mock him for playing the amateur misanthrope while he himself is the professional. Timon feels much the same about him, and they have an enjoyable if excessively long slanging match, one that the production cleverly varies by giving Apemantus an early false exit, apparently in fear of his life.

Making Alcibiades (Sean Arbuckle) a contemporary guerrilla seems very forced, and putting his two mistresses into fatigues even worse. Timon genially urges them to spread disease in Athens, and if they don't look like whores his advice rather loses its point. The production seems to want to make a statement about war, while the play uses it only as a means to a rather hurried end. Alcibiades' dilemma as to whether or not to spare his homeland has always seemed perfunctory, and never more so than here. Nobody knows the chronology, but it seems a reasonable bet that Shakespeare abandoned Timon first for King Lear, a far more nuanced study of madness and ingratitude, and then for Coriolanus.

If the last scenes remind us of anything contemporary it's Beckett. Donaldson's Timon is allowed the comfort of an umbrella straight out of Happy Days, and he brandishes his despair like an ambulant version of the despotic Hamm in Endgame. "I am Misanthropos and hate mankind," he proclaims, standing waist-deep in a pit holding a spade above his head. It's ridiculous and it's undismissable. If Timon never lets up, then neither does the actor. Donaldson may not have the gale-force power one dreams of for Timon's tirades, but he has unfaltering lucidity and a superb vein of gnarled humour; the play acts a lot funnier than it reads. It's unforgiving laughter, culminating in Timon's bequest to his countrymen of a tree from which to hang themselves. This, impeccably drawn-out and timed, is the climax of a major performance, and the climax too of the play. The hero then simply disappears. This is nobody's idea of well-made drama, and Timon of Athens may well be, by academic standards, a bad play. But it's a great bad play.