Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✭
by William Shakespeare, directed by Stephen Ouimette
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
June 2-Sep 22, 2017
Apemantus: “Time to be honest”
The Stratford Festival’s new production of Timon of Athens is unquestionably the best of the three Shakespeares on offer this season. Not only is it a rarity that sheds light on many other of the Bard’s plays, but the production is gripping and the acting is consistently of the highest level led by Joseph Ziegler in the title role. Stephen Ouimette, who directed the play in 2004, returns to direct it again now with even more assurance and insight. Like Shakespeare’s other play based on Greek subject matter, Troilus and Cressida, Timon reveals a deeply cynical philosophy quite different from the world of both the comedies and tragedies that suggest the rifts in the world can be healed.
Both the theme and the structure of Timon make the play seem unusually modern. Unlike all of Shakespeare’s other plays, Timon’s central theme is money. Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Ben Jonson (see Volpone or The Alchemist) or Thomas Middleton (see A Chaste Maid in Cheapside or A Mad World, My Masters) in their satirical comedies often focussed on money and the the depths to which people will demean themselves to acquire it. Shakespeare is now thought to have co-written Timon with Middleton, and to make money the subject of a tragedy, however, is something new. Designer Dana Osborne’s setting of the play in the present reinforces that modernity.
The main plot of the play is like an urban, non-familial version of King Lear. Timon, a wealthy nobleman of Athens, is renowned for his generosity. Rather than giving away his kingdom to his daughters all at once to as does Lear, Timon has been giving away his wealth in the form of gifts and lavish parties to his friends over a period of years. Lear makes his gift in response to Goneril and Regan’s professed love. Timon gives away his wealth in response to his companions’ professed friendship without seeing that their greed has taken advantage of his generosity. When Timon discovers his largesse has bankrupted him, he assumes the “friends” he has benefitted will help him. But, like Goneril and Regan, Timon’s supposed friends reveal their true natures, refuse to help and allow him to fall into poverty. Timon is not denied shelter as is Lear but rather exiles himself. Outraged at the hypocrisy of mankind and railing at the world in general, Timon leaves Athens to live in the desert where his bitter rebukes thrust all visitors away including those few who really do care about him. The play’s abrupt conclusion has suggested to many that it was left unfinished.
The rather undeveloped subplot in Timon is similar to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Alcibiades is a noble soldier who pleads with the senators of Athens not to execute one of his men arrested for murder. Not only will they not listen to Alcibiades but they banish him from Athens. In revenge, Alcibiades in exile musters an army to take over Athens. Unlike Coriolanus, however, Alcibiades is not treated as a traitor and the Athenians seek to placate him.
In terms of structure just as the world of King Lear is sharply divided between the court and the heath, the world of Timon is sharply divided between Timon’s luxurious home in Athens and the desert where he lives self-exiled in a cave. Timon’s home is densely populated by friends, servants and hangers-on. His desert is hot, barren and desolate. In a structure unlike any other play by Shakespeare, the desert scenes are not interleaved with scenes elsewhere, thus making their effect more relentless. Visitors come by Timon’s cave singly or in twos and threes only to be shooed away with insults in what seems to be a deliberately repetitive pattern.
It is Shakespeare’s genius that Timon’s succession of dialogues with his visitors only grows more intriguing rather more boring even though Timon’s expulsion of the visitor or visitors is always the end result. The variety comes from its mixture of true friends with false. First comes Alcibiades, then Apemantus, both true friends, but then these are followed by bandits, then a true friend Flavius, followed the false friends of the Painter and the Poet and finally Flavius again with two senators in a second attempt to take him back to Athens.
In directing Timon for the second time, Stephen Ouimette has made the play bitterer and more uncompromising. When Peter Donaldson played the role for Ouimette in 2004, we felt that Timon like Lear was “a man more sinned against than sinning” in being abandoned to poverty by those to whom he had lent so much money. In Ouimette’s 2017 version he seems to emphasize Apemantus’ assessment of Timon: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends”.
What Ouimette has Ziegler depict in what may his best-ever performance is a man whose tragedy is that he does not know himself. He is a man who needs friends but Ziegler makes clear that Timon does not do good for its own sake but because its gives him pleasure to have people beholden to him. As Apemantus says to the Painter of Timon when Timon is wealthy, “He that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ the flatterer”. By emphasizing this unsympathetic aspect of Timon when he is rich Ouimette and Ziegler make clear the nature of Timon’s tragedy. When in exile in the desert Timon turns away all visitors both the men we know are fools and the ones like Apemantus, Alcibiades and especially his loyal steward Flavius who are his true friends.
We may think that it is Timon’s madness that has made him a universal misanthropist, but we should remember that even Lear in his madness was able to recognize that he did wrong to Cordelia. Timon has so surrounded himself with false friends that he is not able to tell who a true friend is because has no moral compass in himself. When rich he believes his flatterers. When poor he believes everything is lies. Just as with Coriolanus, Shakespeare never gives Timon a moment of self-knowledge because Timon’s tragedy is that he has none.
Ziegler plays this completely unsentimental view of the character to perfection. He makes us suspicious of Timon’s self-satisfaction when he does good, and he makes us suspicious of Timon’s judgement when he later turns away those who truly want to help him. The complexity is that Ziegler shows us that Timon is blind to the outside world when both rich and poor. His ironic statements about the corruptions of the world are often humorous and strike home, but we also have to realize they proceed from spite not from wisdom. And yet Ziegler shows us that Timon retains a sense of humour as in the game he plays with the Poet and the Painter. We wish only that Timon could use his sense of humour to free himself from the blindness of his rage.
Ziegler is supported by an excellent cast. Michael Spencer Davis is moving as Flavius, Timon’s faithful steward. He endows Flavius with such sincerity that he becomes our prime example of selflessness that contradicts Timon’s universal condemnation of humanity. Ouimette links the two more closely by having Flavius rather than the anonymous “Soldier” in the text, be the one to announce Timon’s death. Ben Carlson, a master of complex dialogue, is ideal as the philosopher Apemantus, pictured as a kind of leftist student. Apemantus basically functions as Timon’s fool whom Timon gives licence to say whatever he will about him. The wealthy Timon may enjoy his presence but we wish that he would recognize that what Apemantus speaks is true and not mere contradiction. Act 2 culminates in a huge debate between the two over who has more right to be outraged with humanity, a debate both amusing and intellectually stimulating. Nevertheless, Carlson shows us that Apemantus is truly hurt at being rejected by someone who could now be his greatest friend.
Timon’s three best “friends” are all repellent in their own way. Rylan Wilkie’s faux-innocent Lucullus is rather busy tanning with an unresponsive girlfriend and is shocked that he should be asked for money when he is expecting a gift. Josh Johnston’s two-faced Lucius uses the excuse that he has just made a large purchase as a reason for not helping Timon. Omar Alex Khan’s haughty Sempronius uses the excuse of being asked last as a reason for an insult to excuse him from helping. Josue Laboucane and Mike Nadajewski are excellent at dissembling as the Poet and the Painter who claim they do not flatter for a living.
Tim Campbell is very strong as Alcibiades and carefully gradates his rising anger when he defends his soldier from an accusation of murder. Campbell makes us all too aware of the paradox of a soldier who is praised for killing in the name of the state but reviled if he kills out of passion on his own behalf. Campbell’s clear delivery helps us see the parallel between this subplot about man’s role in society and that in the main plot.
All three of Timon’s servants are well cast – Tyrone Savage as Flaminius, Sébastien Heins as Servilius and Josh Johnston as Lucilius – whose wise, well-spoken comments about the hypocrisy of Timon’s friends links them with the steward Flavius and suggests that there is hope for humanity among the younger generation.
It is seldom that a director has the chance to look at the same complex play thirteen years apart and to bring the insights gained from those years to bear on an even subtler version of a play. This is exactly what has happened with Stephen Ouimette’s second production of Timon of Athens. Ouimette makes that play feel so thoroughly thought-through that any impression that it is a collaboration or unfinished simply don’t arise. Ouimette makes the play one that is illuminated by other better-known plays by Shakespeare and one that in turn illuminates them. For anyone who loves Shakespeare, this production is unmissable.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Joseph Ziegler (centre) as Timon with members of the company; Ben Carlson as Apemantus and Joseph Ziegler as Timon; Joseph Ziegler as Timon (background), Tim Campbell (centre) as Alcibiades and Jacklyn Francis as Soldier. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2017-07-23
Timon of Athens