In the second scene, Timon gives an extravagant dinner for notables from Politics, Finance and the Arts. The play calls for a “masque of Ladies as Amazons.” I ask Edward Watson of the Royal Ballet to create a contemporary Amazonian pas de deux for two tall ballerinas in leotards. Ed knows exactly what I mean: arty soft porn. He’s danced plenty of it himself, worn the leotard, been to the parties, sat next to the sponsors. His pas de deux is ice-cool. At the end, there’s an onstage standing ovation: “The Lords rise from table, with much adoring of Timon.” Dinner is served by young people in sexily tailored black shirts and trousers, the obligatory waiter’s uniform at upmarket parties. They are drama students, many of whom have worn the same uniform and served the same dinner at real upmarket parties where ice-cool dancers have provided the entertainment.
Timon is unique among Shakespeare’s protagonists in having neither family nor lover nor friends. He appears to have no inner life whatsoever, which is red meat to Simon Russell Beale, who sets out to discover why. Money, we think, must be Timon’s armour against the world: a way of buying the world’s gratitude without having to engage with it. He stands bail for a young protégé and springs him from jail, he receives a gift of two greyhounds from a powerful politician and responds with an even better gift, he hands out lavish goody bags at the end of his parties. Money oils the wheels of his network. But Timon shrinks from physical contact: he can barely bring himself even to shake hands.
When Timon suffers his own personal liquidity crisis, his social value plummets. Nobody wants to know him. I remember the story of Alberto Vilar, the American investment manager, who showered money on the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, any number of impeccable cultural causes. He had his own seat at the Met, on the front row of the Vilar Grand Tier. He sat there alone, night after night. The more he gave, the more he promised to give, until, with the inevitability of a satiric fable, it turned out the money wasn’t his to give. It belonged to his investors, and he’d embezzled it to give it away. Alone in his prison cell, at the start of a nine-year stretch, what must he have thought of his erstwhile suitors as they rushed to chisel his name off the fruits of his fraudulent philanthropy? The Vilar Grand Tier at the Met, the Vilar Floral Hall at the Royal Opera House, the Vilar Young Artists Programme—all of them scrubbed clean.
Timon is warned he’s run out of money by his steward, the one person who cares about him. The play has no interest in relations between the sexes: women are brought on stage only to dance or to be the object of Timon’s misogyny after his fall. The bankers, politicians, artists and personal assistants in a contemporary Timon’s world can as easily be women as men, so it isn’t hard to achieve something approaching parity in the casting of it. Flavius the steward becomes Flavia, though in retrospect the name change seems unnecessarily pedantic. It’s an opportunity to bring Deborah Findlay back to Shakespeare ten years after The Winter’s Tale. She and Simon make as much of what isn’t in the text as what is. Flavia loves Timon, but he is utterly incapable of being loved. She cares for him, but he refuses to be cared for. Both are trapped by what they can’t say. Simon and Deborah make of an apparently loveless play a study of the barriers to intimacy.
When Timon’s creditors threaten to pounce, and the recipients of his largesse refuse to help him out, he invites them to one last dinner, one last encounter with the sexy black-clad waiters: “Enter Servants with covered dishes.”
“All covered dishes,” says a titillated senator.
“Royal cheer, I warrant you,” says another.
But “The dishes are uncovered and seen to be full of steaming water.” And Timon speaks at last from his withered heart:
May you a better feast never behold,
You knot of mouth-friends! Smoke and lukewarm water
Is your perfection. This is Timon’s last,
Who, stuck and spangled with your flatteries,
Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces
Your reeking villainy.
A tiny textual tweek (“Smoke” becomes “Filth”) and the scene is set for the most satisfyingly cathartic spectacle I’ve ever staged, Simon Russell Beale splatting the fat cats with shit, the least they deserve in 2012.
After the interval, Timon’s discovery of gold seems to come from a different play, or at least a different production. The satirical precision of the first half is reflected in Tim Hatley’s caustic designs: when Timon tries to borrow money from the banker Lucullus, his offices are in Canary Wharf with a view over the HSBC building. But in the second half, satirical comedy changes with a lurch to moral fable. In a wilderness outside the city, the homeless, hungry Timon digs for roots and finds buried treasure: as if by magic, he’s rich again, and all the bloodsuckers come back to ask him for money. Tim designs an urban wasteland, left behind perhaps by some failed property development. Simon, pushing his belongings in a shopping trolley, rains maledictions on humanity.
But I always look away when, after a little light digging, he finds a trapdoor and gold light floods from it as if we are suddenly in an Indiana Jones movie. When he clambers into the trap and pulls gold ingots out of it, I want to fire the director. I would happily fire the playwright, too, but I’d have to decide which one to fire. Because the source of the problem is that there are at least three: Shakespeare, his younger contemporary Thomas Middleton, and me.
There is no record of Timon ever reaching the stage during Shakespeare’s life. Recent textual scholarship has demonstrated that Middleton wrote around a third of it. It’s an unfinished first draft, full of inconsistencies, something that was never subjected to the rigour of an audience. Many of the stage directions, unlike anything else in the First Folio, feel like Middleton’s memos to himself.
Hautboys playing loud music. A great banquet served in: and then enter Lord Timon, the States, the Athenian Lords, Ventidius which Timon redeemed from prison. Then comes dropping after all Apemantus discontentedly like himself.
You can imagine Middleton scribbling down a precis of what he and Shakespeare agreed he’d write: halfway through the scene, bring on Apemantus, the philosopher, the malcontent, like himself, the way we agreed he’d be.
Middleton, like Jonson, was a go-to playwright for satirical comedy about contemporary London, a genre Shakespeare never attempted, which may have been why he needed help with Timon. Much of the London fat-cat material is Middleton’s, and it’s terrific. Timon’s furious arias are Shakespeare’s, as is most of the experimental second half, where Timon spits venom at everyone who visits him. He cools down only to excoriate the world with the philosopher Apemantus, played at the National with passionate contempt by Hilton McRae. Despite the wild vigour of the verse, the play sinks under its weight. You can see why they put it to one side, unfinished.
So we finished it, cutting large chunks, adding others to make more sense of what was left. We granted ourselves some of the translator’s licence. Many productions of Shakespeare in translation appear to be freer and more radical than our own. In another language, you can bend the text to your will, cut it and rewrite it when it contradicts the story you want to tell, or—in the case of Timon of Athens—the story the playwrights tried but failed to tell.
The final visitors to Timon in his wasteland are a delegation of Athenian senators, who ask him to return to Athens to lead their army against an insurrection led by the rebel Alcibiades. Ten minutes before the end of the play, with no warning, we’re asked to believe that its protagonist is a military genius.
FIRST SENATOR: Therefore so please thee to return with us,
And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take
The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks,
Allowed with absolute power, and thy good name
Live with authority. So soon we shall drive back
Of Alcibiades th’approaches wild,
Who like a boar too savage, doth root up
His country’s peace.
SECOND SENATOR: And shake
s his threat’ning sword
Against the walls of Athens.
FIRST SENATOR: Therefore, Timon—
This is unforgivable dramaturgy, and if it arrived on my desk from a living playwright, I’d send it straight back with a frosty suggestion that it needed more work. This time, I did the work myself, and decided that the senators should want what everyone else who visits Timon wants: his money—in their case, to finance the defence of Athens from the rebels.
LEPIDUS: Therefore so please thee to return with us,
And to our Athens, thine and ours, to bring
Thy gold.
So soon we shall drive back
The wild approach of Alcibiades
Who like a boar too savage, doth root up
His country’s peace.
ISIDORE: And leads his threat’ning rabble
Against the walls of Athens.
LEPIDUS: How shall we defend them without gold?
Therefore, Timon—
It’s not great, some of it doesn’t scan, it smooths out a perfectly comprehensible inversion (“Of Alcibiades th’approaches wild”); and the invented extra line (“How shall we defend them without gold?”) betrays a bad writer’s fear that the audience won’t get the point unless it’s beaten into submission with a mallet. But it’s an improvement on what made it into the First Folio.
We raided Julius Caesar and even As You Like It to plug some narrative gaps, though few people noticed besides Ralph Fiennes, who visited Simon in his dressing room after the show and quoted back to him all the lines we’d stolen from Coriolanus: he’d just made a movie of it. But for most of the second half, Timon’s alienation is so profound that Shakespeare abandons him outside the boundaries of the action and lets him howl. That Simon managed to shape the howl into something worth watching was the show’s most remarkable feature.
Everyone has ideas, everyone’s a director. Hamlet is rarely so confident as when he directs the Player King. Racked with doubt about more or less everything else, he knows for certain what actors are for: “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” He tells the Players how to act, too, which never goes down too well with them in a properly observed production. One thing to be said in Timon of Athens’ favour is that he doesn’t try to tell the poet and painter how to write or paint. “I like your work” is about as far as he goes, which for most artists is as close to criticism as they’ll take from their patrons. “I like your work very much” would be better. “I like your work much more than I like anyone else’s” would be best.
But Hamlet knows what the point of doing Shakespeare is: in his plays, you discover not just the image of virtue, but the age and body of the time. If you direct Shakespeare, you must decide whether you’re aiming for a reflection of his world, your world or a theatrical distortion of them. You start in the study, and you go into rehearsal with a sense of the whole, but you leave yourself room to be surprised, because the actor playing Gertrude may suddenly bolt up a road you never noticed. You must know how to use the stage, to manipulate space, to move actors across it. You need to impose, or evolve, a common approach to what holding the mirror up means, to how much you require of the audience’s imagination, to what constitutes real, to how to deliver the text. You’re sometimes teacher, like I was with the young cast of The History Boys; but there’s nothing you can teach Simon Russell Beale and Deborah Findlay, so you’re sometimes coach, editor or sounding board. You’re the one who reminds them, when you’re rehearsing a scene with them, that they mustn’t know what happens next.
“The word that keeps pinging out of Iago’s soliloquies,” says Rory Kinnear, who needs no reminding, “is ‘now.’ He works on instinct, in the moment.” We’re working through the first act of Othello, and we’ve noticed that Iago has no master plan. He’s been passed over for promotion by a general at whose side he’s fought many times and whom he thought he could trust: Othello, played by Adrian Lester. Iago knows the general is secretly about to marry Desdemona. His plan for revenge, such as it is, is to ruin the general’s wedding night, to “poison his delight” by letting the bride’s father Brabantio know the name of the hotel they’ve eloped to. Iago fails in this, as he fails in nearly everything he tries to do in Venice, where he’s out of his depth. Events overtake him, and Othello is given command of the Venetian army. Iago has no strategy. He’s an opportunist who takes control only when the environment suits him, which it does when the action moves to an army base in Cyprus. He isn’t Lucifer. He isn’t Machiavelli. He’s a soldier.
Shakespeare requires his fellow actor to be large enough in his imaginative and empathetic capacities to track a psychologically and emotionally plausible path through the play. Rory had no interest in a diagnostic approach when he played Hamlet; nor does he want to identify in Iago a specific personality disorder, and define his cunning and callousness as symptoms of psychopathy. He doesn’t want to distance himself from the role and present a case study. He allows himself to be surprised by what happens to Iago, a man who has perfectly good reasons to be what he is at the start of the play, who isn’t fully in control of what happens next, to whom the action of the play occurs spontaneously, as life happens to all of us. Rory invites us not to observe a disordered alien, but to imagine what it would be like to be Iago, so consumed by hatred and envy that he allows them to run out of control.
The received wisdom is that Othello is a play best suited to a studio theatre. It seems to have had its first performance at James I’s court, in relative intimacy. Most of the action unfolds in small rooms, it prefers the domestic to the epic, and it is tightly focused on its four or five major protagonists. But National Shakespeare is public Shakespeare, so Othello is in the Olivier.
The Olivier Theatre is of its time. For twenty or thirty years in the middle of the twentieth century, architects drew their inspiration from the theatres of ancient Greece, and audiences relished their uninterrupted sight lines and democratic openness. You can see why the builders of a new National Theatre would reject the stratified auditoria of the Victorian West End, the sight lines as cramped as the seats, the gallery accessible only via a special outside entrance to keep the plebs away from the grandees in the stalls and circle. The Olivier, based on the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, is a thrilling place to watch a show if the play, the production and the actors are up to it. The problem is that for nearly 2,500 years, between around 500 B.C. and 1970, nobody wrote plays for huge semicircular theatres on the Greek model. Even the Globe, to which Shakespeare’s company transferred Othello after its Whitehall premiere, had a chaotic inn-yard familiarity. Still, I never lost my relish for commissioning or staging plays for a theatre that insisted on “making a large appeal to the whole community,” a central plank of Harley Granville Barker’s original manifesto. I enjoyed wrestling the Olivier to the ground, and the most effective throw was always to work with actors who had the personality and technique to pull 1,150 people towards them. But to abandon those actors for an entire evening on what could feel like a football field never did them any favours, so I always advised directors new to the Olivier to think of creating a much more defined acting space within it.
Designing Othello, four years after Hamlet, Vicki Mortimer had to enclose Iago and Othello in a small office, Desdemona and Othello in a small bedroom, Iago and the troops in a small barrack room. On the other hand, we didn’t want to deny the communality of the Olivier, or the epic sweep of its stage. So two enclosed rooms, the size of shipping containers, moved alternately from the far corners of the stage into the centre, opening to provide small, bleak military accommodations. Pulled back again to the corners they formed part of the perimeter of a vast parade ground: the central public area of the army base that is the setting for most of the play. The most intense scenes, like Iago’s destruction of Othello’s marriage and the murder of Desdemona, all played out on a tiny fraction of the Olivier stage
. They were fuelled by epic passions, but were physically confined as much as they would have been in a tiny pub theatre.
It barely occurred to us to play Othello as anything other than a contemporary play, nor to unmoor it from its roots in the real world. It is devoid of fantasy. The reflection in the mirror is pin-sharp: soldiers stationed abroad, waiting for orders after going into a war that never happened. But I needed help with the army, a world about which I knew nothing. A mutual friend introduced me to Jonathan Shaw, who had recently left the British army after thirty-two years in the Parachute Regiment. He’d served in the Falklands, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, where he commanded the British-led division in Basra. We met after he’d read the play for the first time since school.
“Well, I know exactly where Iago’s coming from,” he said as we sat down to lunch, which was a bracing start. He quoted a truism about the military hierarchy: that every career bar one ends in failure. He said that many ex-military personnel would sympathise with how Iago feels about Othello’s betrayal of his trust when, before the play starts, he promotes Cassio, a well-born university graduate, over him. Trust, said Jonathan, is the basis of all soldiering. Othello and Iago have fought together and faced death together. They’ve probably trusted their lives to each other. Betrayal, the most heinous of military sins, is the last to be suspected. It was no surprise to Jonathan that Othello trusted Iago over his wife.
For Jonathan, Othello was a piece of detailed social realism about his own world, though it has next to nothing to say about armed conflict. Othello is employed by the Venetian Senate to fight the forces of the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus. But within seconds of Othello’s arrival in Cyprus, only half an hour into the play, the Ottoman fleet is sunk in a storm. “Boiled down to the basics,” wrote Jonathan in the Othello programme, “armies have traditionally been designed to kill people and break things.” Now Othello and his army must stew in barracks instead of carrying out the task for which he’s best suited. Iago, cheated of his revenge in Venice, has Othello and Cassio at his mercy in a barrack-room hot-house which is much more the NCO’s element than the general’s. Jonathan Bailey, transparently honest as Cassio, was never better than when he blamed himself for trashing his own reputation: all Iago’s doing. “And into this context of operational turmoil,” wrote Jonathan, “Shakespeare introduces sex. Civilian spouses and partners do not go on operations with their partners, based on the long-held view that the two strongest human urges—for sex and violence—should be kept apart.” Desdemona is only there because Othello, newly married and besotted, exploits his political masters’ urgent need for his services by insisting that if he accepts command, his new wife comes too. It turns out to be a huge mistake, another fault line that Iago can exploit, busking his way from stratagem to stratagem as he tears Othello apart.
Balancing Acts Page 22