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by Ben Jonson, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

August 15-October 3, 2015

Surly: “Alchemy is a pretty kind of game,

      Somewhat like tricks o' the cards, to cheat a man

      With charming”

Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) is not only on of the great comedies of Shakespeare’s day, but one of the great comedies in English.  This is the Stratford Festival’s third production of the work and it is infinitely more enjoyable than the Festival’s last production of it in 1999 directed by Douglas Campbell.  Jonson’s play is a riotously funny satire of men’s baser vices, particularly greed and lust, and of men’s credulity when someone, no matter by what outrageous means, can promise to satisfy these vices.  People today may not rely on an alchemist to fulfil their needs, but there are any number of self-proclaimed financial and lifestyle advisors today who use a different mumbo-jumbo in just the same way.

The Alchemist is loosely based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy Mostellaria (c. 193bc) about how a young man misuses his father house when his father is away on business.  Jonson fleshes out the the skeleton of Plautus’s plot and sets in firmly in the London of his own time.  In The Alchemist, Lovewit (David Collins), the owner of the house, has fled London because of an outbreak of the plague and has left his house in the care of his butler Jeremy (Jonathan Goad).  Jeremy rechristens himself “Captain Face” and calls on his old friends, the conman Subtle (Stephen Ouimette) and the prostitute Dol Common (Brigit Wilson), to use the house as their home base for illicit activities.  Subtle sets himself up as an alchemist and Face goes out in the streets of London to procure clients for Subtle and for Dol. 

The play begins after the trio have become so successful in ten months that Face and Subtle fall into an argument about how they should divide their takings.  Finally, Dol persuades them that they must work as a team or they will lose all the leads they have worked so hard to get.  One by one we see a parade of the gullible and greedy as they enter the house to enquire how their various projects with the alchemist are proceeding.

Their first gull is the insipid lawyer’s clerk Dapper indifferently played by Antoine Yared.  He pays Subtle to give him a charm so that he will win at any game he plays.  Subtle and Face tell him that the Queen of Fairy herself will come to bless him and concoct a humiliating ceremony for him to undertake in order to meet her.

Their second gull is the naive, good-natured tobacconist Abel Drugger, played by Steve Ross as such comic figures should be with a compete seriousness that makes their credulity all the funnier.  Drugger’s first request suggests that the West had its own notion of feng shui before it had contact with China.  Drugger wants advice from Subtle as to where to put the door and shelves in his new shop to have the most success.  Drugger becomes one of the most frequent visitors as he keeps thinking of more details that he wants Subtle to settle for him.

Next comes one of Jonson’s greatest creations, the grotesque knight Sir Epicure Mammon.  Scott Wentworth plays this part to the hilt, revelling in Mammon’s luxurious language filled with classical allusions and outrageous imagery.  Mammon has been paying Subtle to create nothing less than that ne plus ultra of alchemy, the philosopher’s stone.  The philosopher’s stone not only confers eternal youth on the possessor but allows him to transmute all base metals into gold.  Mammon’s speeches fantasizing on what he will do with the stone are masterpieces of hyperbole.  Costume designer Carolyn M. Smith has given him a period gold-brocade jerkin, pumpkin breeches and cape to cover the huge fat suit Wentworth wears, but that fat suit should really make Wentworth look at least as fat above the waist as it does below. 

Mammon brings with him the only sceptic of all the visitors, Surly, whom he hopes to convert to the benefits of alchemy.  Quite the opposite happens since Surly sees Face and Subtle for the conmen they are.  To gather information that Mammon is being cheated, Surly vows to return disguised as a Spaniard.  Wayne Best gives a well-judged performance in the role, gradually increasing the vehemence of his anger against the trio until it can no longer be contained when he returns later in disguise.

To show that greed tempts people of all persuasions and levels of society, Jonson includes a pair of Anabaptists, the deacon Ananias and his pastor Tribulation Wholesome, who have come to buy “orphans’ goods” of metal which are, in fact, metal items belonging to Mammon that he hopes to turn to gold.  These base metals, Subtle assures them, can turned to gold and then used to make counterfeit coins, all for the good of the church, of course.  Rylan Wilkie is very funny as the sanctimonious but fearful Ananias, while Randy Hughson is just as funny as the far less scrupulous Tribulation, who overrides Ananias’ worries since he is more interested in Subtle’s promises of future wealth.        

On one of Drugger's returns he brings two people new to London, Kastril (Jamie Mac), a young man who wants to learn to “quarrel” (i.e., to learn rhetoric), since Subtle is supposedly a master of the art, and his young, widowed sister Dame Pliant (Jessica B. Hill), since Subtle as well as everything else is supposedly a renowned matchmaker.  Mac draws humour from Kastril’s generally choleric nature and lack of knowledge.  Hill, however, uses the uninflected tones of a Southern Ontarian teenager and certainly doesn’t reflect, even superficially, the kind of restraint one might expect of a widow. 

Jonson’s play is unusual among plays of the period for observing Aristotle’s unities of time and place even more strictly than the ancient Greeks.  This is the only play of the period where for the first four acts there is a complete identity of the stage and a single room in a house.  Besides that, Jonson has the stage time of the action equal the real time it takes to perform.  Modern drama usually traces this strictness of time and place back to the naturalism of Strindberg’s Miss Julie of 1888, but clearly Jonson anticipates this by more than 250 years. 

Because of this strictness, a director has to establish the geography of the single room right from that start and never vary from it.  We must know where the front door to the house is and where each of the room’s two doors lead.  The Tom Patterson stage is much more amenable to this identity of room and stage than is the Festival stage where it was last staged in 1999.  Indeed, the great flaw of that production was that Douglas Campbell never abided by a single floor-plan for the room.  Luckily, this time Cimolino is almost perfectly consistent, breaking the room’s setup only once by having Dame Pliant enter through a vom that we had been led to believe was a wall. 

Cimolino admirably paces the action gradually heightening the tension that the trio have begun to juggle so many clients that they are naturally bound to fail the longer the action continues.  The greatest failing is that he does not lend the show enough variety of tone.  It starts out so loud it leaves nowhere more expansive for the three main characters to go.  Cimolino does pause to let us enjoy Mammon’s extensive fantasies of luxury, Subtle’s long explanation of the nature of alchemy and Tribulation’s long speech of how earthly ends can justify spiritual means.  But, otherwise, the impression of the first four acts is of continual noise and shouting.  This finally dies down in Act 5 when the scene switches for a moment to the anxious neighbours gathered outside the house for the master’s inevitable return.

Though we are more familiar with Shakespeare’s comedies than with Jonson’s, it happens that Shakespeare’s style of romantic comedy was atypical of the period.  Shakespeare’s contemporaries enjoyed satirical comedy and Jonson’s represent the pinnacle of that style.  The Festival may have staged The Alchemist three times, but productions of it are still so rare that anyone curious to see a fine production of a masterpiece by Shakespeare’s great contemporary should not miss this opportunity.  Let’s hope that Cimolino’s production of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair in 2009 and The Alchemist this year signal a commitment to exploring Shakespeare’s contemporaries since not only do these plays shed greater light on Shakespeare by giving his work a context, the best of these plays are masterpieces in themselves.  

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Stephen Ouimette as Subtle, Brigit Wilson as Dol Common and Jonathan Goad as Face; Jonathan Goad as Lungs and Scott Wentworth as Sir Epicure Mammon; Stephen Ouimette as Subtle. ©2015 David Hou.