Timon of Athens
The Stratford festival
The National Post

Stratford has fruitfully twinned its production of The School for Scandal with Timon of Athens, casting mostly the same actors in another lampoon of society - though a far more savage one.

Gossip, though it has its place, is the least of the ills that Shakespeare, and possibly another, excoriated in Timon. Improvidence and ingratitude are the principal targets here. Timon is an Athenian noble who spends lavishly and generously, though you couldn't quite call him a philanthropist. Most of his money goes on buttering up the upper crust. He gives his peers presents, redeems them from debtors' prison, banquets them extravagantly and incessantly. When he goes broke and tries to call in favours, his friends - or flatterers, as outsiders call them - all find excuses to deny him. Turning 180 degrees, he invites them to a final feast at which he throws water in their faces; he then takes to the woods to live on roots and misanthropy.

 The peculiarity of a play that's nominally a tragedy is that its protagonist has no interior life. In his prosperous days he has not so much as an aside, let alone a soliloquy. Once disillusioned he's all monologue, even when ostensibly talking to other people, but even here he never questions himself; he just pours out invective against whatever humanity happens to cross his path.

The play's first, satirical half works rollickingly, stingingly well. It does in Stephen Ouimette's new production at the Tom Patterson, just as it did when he staged the same play in the same space 12 years ago. The two versions are not identical, though both are in modern dress: an almost inevitable choice for a play whose money-mad setting so closely resembles our own. Some things, I think, were done better the first time. The dance of Amazons, surprise visitors at Timon's place, occasioned a wittier exposure of his obsequious guests than the more orgiastic entertainment that's on offer now.

Similarly, I preferred Ouimette's more economical staging of Timon's exile, which had the late Peter Donaldson standing waistdeep throughout in the pit that he now called home. Joseph Ziegler's Timon roams around a lot more, which is less effective. The great thing about Ziegler's performance is the wit that he finds in Timon's later diatribes.

Digging for roots, the hermit finds gold, which he happily bestows on those who would make the most mischief with it: on thieves, and on rebellious soldiers on their way to lay waste to Athens. He also enjoys telling prospective refugees from the city that they are welcome to come to a tree near his cave and hang themselves. In his earlier incarnation, Ziegler has the appropriate glazed quality for Timon's thoughtless benevolence. As a program note points out, Timon's progress is that of Ziegler's definitive Scrooge in reverse. Except that he doesn't progress; magnificent as Timon's tirades are, they can't help becoming monotonous, enmeshed as they are in a structure that consists of him being successively visited by all the people he knew in Act One.

They are all well acted here: by Ben Carlson, with his gift for plain speaking, presenting the cynical truthteller Apemantus as a youngish present-day philosopher, ostentatiously reading a paperback while riot swirls around him; by Michael Spencer-Davis as the faithful steward whose honesty almost softens his former master's heart; and by Tim Campbell as the disaffected general who brings Athens to its knees and whose scenes benefit here from being dolled up in desert-war fatigues.

The corrupt city itself affords amusingly decadent cameos from Robert King and Rylan Wilkie as Timon's parasite pals, and from Josue Labourcane and Mike Nadajewski as artists lining up for his patronage. Tyrone Savage has an exciting disgusted outburst as a servant outraged by man's ingratitude. The loyalty of Timon's staff, even after he's able to pay them, is the play's warmest argument in his favour. But it seems that even his author gave up on him. Alone among Shakespeare's tragic heroes, he dies offstage, leaving only an unregenerate epitaph. Like his life, his play doesn't end; it stops.