End of a Genius

Riffs on Shakespeare: Bingo
Northcott Theatre
The Observer

When I told the taxi driver who was taking me to Exeter’s fine and progressive Northcott Theatre that they were playing Bingo that night, he was bemused. ‘Aren’t there cinemas for that kind of thing?’

The attraction in question has now run its course at Exeter but is on view this week at Plymouth. Brethren, be advised. This is play. Edward Bond’s account of the last days of William Shakespeare, who never got to shout anything as triumphant as Bingo. In the eyes of the world, and especially of his own family, this successful playwright and Stratford property-owner has hit the jackpot; as death approached, he comes increasingly to believe that the jackpot has hit him.

Visually, the Shakespeare presented by Mr Bond and his actor Bob Peck is the traditional egghead; the shell, however is hollow. Mr Bond has seized on the most disconcerting fact about Shakespeare: that this overflowing genius should apparently have dried up. Has any other comparable figure ever truly retired? Mr Bond shows us Ben Jonson persuading him to make a comeback, failing and lapsing into criticism of the Late Romances. Just what, he asks, was The Winter’s Tale about anyway? (‘He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such-like drolleries,’ Jonson wrote in his introduction to Bartholomew Fair.)

Shakespeare doesn’t answer, mindful perhaps of the discrepancy between the idealized daughter-figures of those plays and the shrewishly unimaginative actuality of his own Judith (who on this showing was fittingly commemorated by my favourite Stratford landmark- now, alas, no more - the Judith Shakespeare Wimpy
Bar).

Then again, the qualified optimism of those plays seems to have been decisively denied by the experiences of his affluence. Shakespeare, the one Elizabethan playwright to go into management and profitably invest the proceeds finds himself in his capitalist role either the witness of cruelty or an accomplice to it. His assistant in enclosing landowners against those of the townspeople is sought and obtained by the local entrepreneur, the manner of whose speech Shakespeare might well find disturbingly familiar.

‘We needn’t,’ he avers, ‘build a bridge if there’s a ford downstream’ (cf. Much Ado About Nothing - ‘What need the bridge much broader than the flood’). A homeless woman stumbles into his garden, is whipped for vagrancy, and eventually executed. Here, brought literally home to him, is the reality of those ‘poor naked wretches’ apostrophized by King Lear.

When Mr Bond wrote his own Lear he had the King die while attempting to destroy the society he had created. His Shakespeare dies partly of drink (Mr Bond having adopted the legend of the final, fatal carousal with Jonson) but more basically of disgust at his failure to act upon his own deeper insights, which should have prompted a similar revolt. I think that Mr Bond has underestimated the force of the Shakespearean Lear’s great question, ‘Is there any cause in Nature (not society) that makes thee hard hearts?’ Shakespeare believed, as Mr Bond does not, in natural human evil; facing this; he could also face its opposite- as in Jonson’s bugbear The Winter’s Tale, which in many respects (notably the progress from court to country) both echoes and answers King Lear.

Still, everyman has the right to his own Shakespeare; and Mr Bond’s, once the first deep credulous breath has been taken, is powerfully convincing. Mr Peck, morose and haunted, rises to a funny and harrowing last scene, with Anne Hathaway (the unseen image of his greatest failure) beating hysterically on his bedroom door, under which, as a placating gesture, is finally slipped Will’s will (with provision duly made- as he insists in Mr Bond’s nearest approach to high camp- for the bed).

The action surrounding the central figure is less satisfactory, partly due to acting which- perhaps influenced by the laconic Royal Court style- is often cursory, underweight and thickly Mummersetted. It is frequently difficult to determine just what is going on, particularly in relation to the enclosure struggles; and the panoramic Northcott stage is- in more than one way- a barrier to concentration. At the moment I respond to the play with respect rather than enthusiasm. I would like an opportunity to change my mind.