Timon of Athens, review by Peter Buckroyd

I have to admit that I’m a Kathryn Hunter groupie. Some of most exciting theatrical experiences I have had have involved her – as director of an incredible Pericles at the Globe and as actor in Kafka’s Monkey at the Young Vic, in The Skriker at the National, as the best Fool I have ever seen at the RSC and as a Cleopatra which had me on the edge of my seat and open mouthed with amazement and admiration at the RSC. So I have been excited since the present season was announced that she is playing Timon.
But her highly individual physical and vocal delivery is not to everyone’s taste. And at the preview which we attended people further back said they couldn’t hear everything. That wasn’t my experience because I had made sure I was in the front row so that I could see at close quarters her incredible use of hands and arms. She is an actor (like the incomparable Oliver Ford-Davies and Ian McKellen) who excites me as soon as she appears on stage and opens her mouth.
One of the things about this performance is that she gives nothing at all away about what she is feeling and why in the first half. Her Timon is engaged with philanthropy and generosity but not at all with the people she invites to her lavish banquets. She smiles, greets and embraces but without any real personal connection. Her guests recognise people and types we can recognise but she doesn’t. She is on a different planet altogether. And so it makes sense that she can be as intense in her rejection of the world as she was in displaying her generosity. She was never part of the world as evinced by her ignoring her Steward’s warnings.
I wasn’t convinced in the first half that the acting was as good as it might have been but then I realised that director Simon Godwin was turning things on their head by suggesting that the servants were real and the Athenians shallow caricatures. Flavius the Steward (Patrick Drury), the Welsh Apemantus (Nia Gwynne), Lucilius (Salman Akhtar) and Servilius (Riad Richie), all dressed in black, were not part of the corrupt world. Only they seemed ‘real’ in modern terms. It was striking in the opening banquet scene Alcibiades (splendidly played by Debbie Korley) looked different from all the others. And it was masterstroke by Godwin that these Corbinites, genuine in their desire for a revolution from all the self-seeking, utterly selfish Tories, should turn out to be the ones in Alcibiades’s victorious army.
I’ve never thought that Aristotle had much to do with Shakespearian tragedy and yet I ended up thinking at the end of this production that it was as Aristotelian as Shakespeare gets: greatness meeting with a fall, realisation and purgation for the audience, all the greater for not witnessing Timon’s death on stage.
This production is pretty amazing to look at. Just about everything in the early part of the play is gold – the backdrop, the carpet, the statue, the table settings, the gifts Timon bestows, the chairs and chandelier and the wonderful OTT costumes designed as is the set by Soutra Gilmour. Then it turns to black and white so that gold, black, white and dirt all become powerfully and resonantly symbolic, especially when Timon digs up the chest of gold from the dirt.
There are lots of splendid moments – the freezes at the banquet, the intertwined missions to get contributions for Timon’s impoverishment, Alcibiades’s protest march, the barefootedness of Timon’s second satirical feast, the picnic Apemantus brings to the hermitised Timon, the unforgettable
moment then Flavius shares his little reining gold with the other servants.
Two things I don’t understand. This is just about the only Shakespearian tragedy when there is no mention of the protagonist’s family. Why was Timon wearing a wedding ring then? I fear this was an error. The other thing is that it has become a fashion in plays not directed by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman for actors to lose their consonants this means that they become hard to hear. It is an issue for the RSC voice coaches (such as Kate Godfrey in this case) to address with some urgency.
I think this is a play worth seeing – as is Tartuffe. Come and make a special treat of it with a night or two at Moss Cottage with its newly refurbished bathrooms.