It's often seen as an unfinished play of two halves--did you succeed in integrating the two halves satisfactorily?
GD: Reading around the play I came across a reference by the scholar G. Wilson Knight describing Timon of Athens as having "massive simplicity." I thought that was a brilliant elucidation of the play. It is unlike any other Shakespeare play in that it's a parable, a simple moral fable. There is simplicity to its structure. We took that massive simplicity as our keynote in terms of the design: Stephen Brimson Lewis created a very bare stage with a large pair of doors at the back for the first half; and in the second half the empty plain and a sort of tomb for his cave--a grave that he was building in the middle of the stage--with a large eclipsed sun on the back wall that was reminiscent of the artist Richard Long's work. It allowed you to see how the two halves of the play are very different, something that needs to be preserved and perhaps enhanced.
Another thing that helped us to enhance that was discovering that Duke Ellington had written a jazz score for Timon of Athens. He had been at a jazz festival in Stratford Ontario and snuck into the back of the theater, where he was completely overwhelmed by watching Shakespeare. He then wrote a jazz suite called Such Sweet Thunder based on character studies of Shakespeare characters. Stratford Ontario got round to doing Timon of Athens and felt it needed jazzing up, so they asked the new Shakespeare convert Duke Ellington to write the music. When we came to do the play John Woolf, the RSC's head of music, and I contacted Stratford Ontario who found the score in a box in the cellar. Then John Woolf constructed the music and adapted it for our band. Ellington's music could be very funny; the brass would sometimes guffaw, and sometimes it would sob, and that seemed to me to fit the parable/moral fable nature of the play. So Wilson Knight's "massive simplicity," as applied to the set and the costumes and the approach to character, along with something of Duke Ellington's music, helped me to understand what the play was.
The play's said to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton: were you aware of any differences in the writing and did it affect your production in any way?
GD: It became very interesting to look at in terms of playing the characters. It is a very bleak, dark play and it has all the snarl of Thomas Middleton. It also has something of the rage of Ben Jonson. I'm not remotely suggesting that it was a collaboration with Jonson, but it is like a Jonson play in that the characters represent types to some extent, particularly in the first half with characters like the Poet and the Painter. They represent a whole spectrum of sycophancy and flattery and the sick society of Athens. Having identified that tone of the play, it allowed us to explore some of the themes of this society, the "dream of friendship" that Timon is lost in.
The role of Alcibiades has often puzzled critics; how do you think it relates to the Timon plot?
GD: The relationship between Alcibiades and Timon seemed to me to echo the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. The adoration that Socrates has for the younger man, and the younger man's understanding and indeed flirtation with Socrates' obsession with him, seemed to find echoes in Timon's obsession with Alcibiades. I don't think that is viewed from a sympathetic gay perspective at all. It's not how you might describe the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, because Alcibiades does not return that affection and is surrounded by his whores, the only women in the play. We began rehearsals with Alan Bates playing Timon of Athens. He was also playing Antony opposite Frances de la Tour's Cleopatra that season. He became too ill to carry on rehearsing Timon and had to withdraw, suffering from the illness that very shortly was to kill him. I had two weeks to go and had to find a new Timon of Athens. I phoned the extraordinary Michael Pennington and said to him, "How do you fancy playing Timon of Athens? We've got two weeks," and he said, "It's not impossible." It wasn't and he was magnificent. I don't think we were allowed enough time to develop some of the themes that were emerging thoroughly because we had to get on and do the play.
The other element which we developed is a very difficult storytelling beat: the scene where Alcibiades pleads to the senators on behalf of an absent friend who has apparently committed some outrage, which seems to be a murder. It's a big beat to suddenly get, at the end of which, despite the passion with which Alcibiades pleads for his friend, the Senate will not be merciful. When Alcibiades objects they punish him. He then becomes a rather Coriolanus-like figure. We decided to stage the outrage at the end of the Amazon masque. A soldier tried to pick up one of the drag queen Amazons and then, because he was afraid for his reputation, dispatched the Amazon. It was a very violent moment but it allowed you to see a product of that society and to see what Alcibiades is pleading on behalf of. There's a line where Alcibiades says, "Who is a man that is not angry?" That seemed to be a byline for the play.
It's been suggested that the play should be read as a fable or morality tale, or political allegory with the resonance of "Steward"/"Stewart" (or "Stuart")--was your production influenced by any of these theories?
GD: We had a sort of Jacobean-Athenian production, because I felt that there were elements of the play which were certainly echoes of the Jacobean court of the new King James. I detected a very strong homosexual element in the play. This seemed to me to clearly reflect Jacobean society and the scandals of James, as a clearly homosexual man, declaring his obsession for Robert Carr (who became Viscount Rochester and then the Earl of Somerset) and later George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. There's something in his adoration of those frankly unsuitable men and his willingness to give them huge amounts of power and money that is in itself corrupt. There's also a really potent image in the masque of Amazons. Masques are another Jacobean feature of court life and the Amazons were quite a feature of the drama of the time. [John] Marston's Antonio and Mellida has as a central character a man who is dressed as an Amazon. There is an ambivalence to the sexuality of the Amazons; they're either fighting women or they are effeminate men. When Timon invites all these single men to his extraordinary banquet and has Cupid introduce a masque of the Amazons, it's the equivalent of some kind of drag party. It's like the drag ball scene in John Osborne's A Patriot for Me. There was something very strong in why that lonely man, Timon, has to have so many people about him and yet chooses not to examine very clearly or very closely what the nature of those relationships is, and why he is shocked when they turn on him.
The character of Timon is often seen as problematic; he's been called "colourless and neutral"--what was your attitude to the character? Are we supposed to admire his prodigality or censure his lack of common sense?
GD: I don't think he's as three-dimensional in the first half as some of the other characters. You get a lot of information about Timon from other people. But you also are aware, with so many sycophants and flatterers and parasites around him, that he's a prey to these people, and if we can see it why can't he? I think he comes into his own in the second half with the extremity of the language. It makes him such a joy, the richness of that bile!
There is revulsion in the play. There is disgust, in a way understood and articulated by Apemantus, but unleashed upon Timon and expressed in the violent misanthropy of his language. But I think it's Apemantus who gives us our perspective in the play. Whereas we sympathize deeply with the moral rectitude and integrity of Flavius and the servants, it is Apemantus who allows us to understand the play. We had John Woodvine as Flavius giving real backbone to that sense of his integrity. What Richard McCabe as Apemantus did was allow us to laugh along with him, but also show how he sees with absolute clarity, with a lucidity that no one else does, and he articulates Timon's problem in the line, "the middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends." That is a very modern line; it makes you think of so many people who have found fame fast, or become rich quick, who don't know what it's like to just live in the middle like most of humanity. That allowed me to understand that Timon isn't a normal person. He's always had these great riches a
nd is a great man, a loved and a generous man, but a man who has been blinkered by his wealth. It's inevitable that he will swing so completely in the opposite way. That made the moral fable in the end quite moving.
Is there any significance in the negative characterizations of the Painter and Poet in the play?
GD: I think what it says is that if society is built upon patronage and you have to flatter your patron, it's not good for art. Society is riddled with people who are in competition for the lord's favor, and that leads to this breed of parasitic sycophancy. That's the point where the animal imagery increases. When the creditors come round to get their masters' money back from Timon he becomes almost like a Christ-figure, or a bear being bated with dogs. He says, "Tear me, take me." There's something self-flagellating about it and it becomes almost like he is submitting himself to the humiliation of being torn apart by wild dogs. Macbeth also chooses an image like that: "They have tied me to a stake, I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course." The image of the helpless animal being torn apart allows us to have some sympathy for what the character is going through. I suspect that happens to some extent with Timon as well.
The only women in the play are Alcibiades' whores; did the lack of women create any problems? Does this make it misogynistic or just misanthropic?
GD: I think it is misogynistic, but in the context of a mass misanthropy. It seems as though Shakespeare has jumped into a very black abyss. I don't think I know of a more violent line than "Paint till a horse may mire upon your face. / A pox of wrinkles." That's full of self-loathing and misanthropy and indeed misogyny. I suppose, in the last part, that twisted disease perspective takes us, a bit like the fly scene in Titus Andronicus, to a Beckettian world where things are reduced to their essentials and where a potentially tragic situation becomes bleak and very black and very funny, climaxing in the wonderful scene between Apemantus and Timon. Timon says, "Were I like thee, I'd throw away myself." It's a brilliantly modern line, there's nothing complicated or "Shakespearean" about it. Ultimately the experience of doing the play and living with it was more like the experience of living with a Ben Jonson or a Thomas Middleton play. The snarl in the satire isn't always easy to live with.
12. RSC 1999, directed by Gregory Doran: Timon (Michael Pennington) with Apemantus (Richard McCabe) in "a Beckettian world where things are reduced to their essentials."
PLAYING TIMON: MICHAEL PENNINGTON
Michael Pennington is a classical actor of some repute, whose career with the RSC has spanned more than thirty years. His performance of Hamlet for the company in 1980 is still lauded as one of the great stage realizations of the role. Other successes in Stratford include Angelo in Measure for Measure (1974), Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1976), Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost (1978), the title role in Hippolytus (1978), Donal Davoren in The Shadow of a Gunman (1980), and, of course, the title role in Timon of Athens in 1999. He is the cofounder, along with Michael Bogdanov, of The English Shakespeare Company, with whom he performed in the landmark 1987 epic The Wars of the Roses, a seven-play version of Shakespeare's history cycle. He has appeared in many films and television dramas, and has directed numerous productions, including Twelfth Night for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He is the author of seven books, including guides to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, as well as Are You There, Crocodile?, a personal account of his attempt to write a one-man play about the life of Chekhov.
The character of Timon is often seen as problematic; he's been called "colourless and neutral"--what was your attitude to the character? Are we supposed to admire his prodigality or censure his lack of common sense?
MP: Nothing could be less "neutral" than Timon's character--he is a creature of two wild extremes, brilliantly summed up by Apemantus: "The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends." In the first half he compulsively buys friendship to staunch a fearful loneliness; Freud would call him a narcissist, in the strictest sense of the term; he feels the glow of his kindness even more warmly than do its beneficiaries. Then his fear of solitude fulfills itself and releases an equally excessive misanthropy, expressed in some of the most virulently beautiful language Shakespeare ever wrote.
Admittedly, Timon can seem like a second-rate Lear, a curmudgeonly poor relation without Lear's full cause of weeping, his journey from Camelot to Cardboard City no more than a massive petulance. But that has its own theatrical value when the psychology is so astute and the writing of the second half is so beautiful in its wild, wintry way.
Timon's not an easy play and not one of Shakespeare's most popular; do you think it could be said to have contemporary relevance and did the production try to capitalize on that at all?
MP: I think the play is hugely underrated. Its psychology is absolutely modern. It's a study of the vanity of benevolence. And the resentment that creates in the recipients. Timon is the compulsive party-giver who always gives a gift out of proportion to the friendship; who insists on always paying for dinner, always, embarrassingly. We have characters like this in show business. Underneath it all he is a terrified loner who then dives headlong into what he always feared most, his own company, exchanging woozy altruism for comminatory rage, snarling in the wilderness. His misanthropy is just benevolence with its nap reversed. All this makes complete psychological sense to me.
It's often seen as an unfinished play of two halves--did you feel the production succeeded in integrating the two halves satisfactorily?
MP: I don't think they are meant to be integrated in the conventional sense of the second half resolving the first. But you never forget the first half during the second--all the significant Athenians come and visit Timon in his cave; though Timon now feels "open, bare / For every storm that blows," he always harks back to the days when he "had the world as my confectionary"; at the end there is a mysterious and beautiful death, like that of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra without any apparent physical cause. There is something of a parable about the play--perhaps because characters like the Poet and the Painter have no name but simply represent their professions and the fact that Timon is turned down by the magic number of three flatterers.
The play's said to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton: were you aware of any differences in the writing and did it affect your performance in any way?
MP: None at all. The second half is unmistakably Shakespearean, I should say--it has a timbre not unlike Lear.
It's been suggested that the play should be read as a fable or morality tale, or political allegory with the resonance of "Steward"/"Stewart" (or "Stuart")--were you influenced by any of these theories?
MP: I've never heard of that. Flavius is a steward, just that and no pun intended. Otherwise I imagine Timon and Alcibiades and the rest might be given punning names also. But I do think the play satirized James I's court, which was fashion-obsessed, gluttonous, sexually corrupt; cash for official favors was rife, lobbyists everywhere, and the Crown made extravagant gifts to the courtiers to purchase their loyalty and create a confining net of obligations. That's exactly the first half of Timon. Perhaps this is why it was never performed in Shakespeare's lifetime--too close to the bone.
The role of Alcibiades has often puzzled critics; how do you think it relates to the Timon plot?
MP: Clearly Alcibiades, who is implicitly connected to Timon--he is the first to greet him in the second half and speaks warmly of him at the end--is presented as an alternative; a man in whom anger at the city's ingratitude has translated into positive action. So he returns to claim and clean up the society of Athens, whereas Timon just sulks, knocking his visitors' heads together while sitting on his crock of gold.
Is there any significance in the negative characterizations of the Painter and Poet in the play?
MP: Are they negative? They're just doing their best to earn a living in this particular and somewhat corrupt world.
The only women in the play are Alcibiades' whores; did the lack of women create any problems? Doe
s this make it misogynist or just misanthropic?
MP: No, it's just unusual. The point is that unlike other Shakespearean heroes Timon is given no relationships or family at all, no women in his life or men either; we don't even know the source of his wealth. That's probably unique in Shakespeare, and a means of expressing his self-involvement. When I played it I was castigated by one proselytizing gay critic for not playing what was obvious--that Timon was gay. It hadn't occurred to me, probably not to Shakespeare either; but it shows you can read your own preferences into such a man. But then I was castigated once for daring to play Oscar Wilde when I was a "known heterosexual," so fame comes in odd forms.
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER
IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
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