Theatre
False friends
Mark Amory
Timon of Athens (Warehouse) Another Country (Greenwich) Four men in sandals and what I took to be Japanese kit walked onto the bare wooden stage, bowed to one another and then began a lot of smiling, their eyes twinkling and their lips twitching with merriment in an irritating way. Timon of Tokyo, I thought to myself, and overacted too, but that was my last critical reaction. The jocular quartet had come to sell things to Timon, who came bustling in and immediately established himself as a generous, happy fellow and excellent host, who believed 'Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support him after.' Just as worries as to whether he can afford his life-style started to stir, his steward informed us that he certainly can not. Creditors press. Timon turns confidently to his friends, who produce only excuses. His amazement turns to bitterness, he throws a last banquet at which the guests receive only hot water, and leaves Athens for a wood where he spends the whole of the second act railing against mankind and in particular anyone who comes to see him. Though he finds gold, he gives it away and dies by the seashore.
I tell you the story because I had not seen the play before and was uncertain of it myself. Better acquaintance, I suspect, would make me even more grateful for this spare production, which never drags, even in the practically stationary second half. We have lost a fool, a masque with Amazons and Cupid, and several servants. The fairweather friends are not played as grotesques, but their evasiveness is allowed to be amusing; nor is the banquet elaborate — just rice and perhaps pieces of carrot skilfully eaten with chopsticks. Richard Pasco in strong voice knits the two halves together as if there was no problem. A complicated character study would not be in place, but he supplies apt touches, as when he lays a hand on his steward's shoulder in a kindly but patronising way and explains that his friends will help him out. My quarrel is not with the production or playing, which have conjured two and a half enjoyable hours out of a famously difficult and unpopular play. it is with Shakespeare, always risky. The inadequate story appears to be a parable with a moral too simple to be interesting; though I find there is disagreement as to what that moral is. It did not seem to me to be that riches are no good (Timon would have gone on being happy as long as his funds held out) and I take it for granted that ingratitude is to be frowned on. Timon is (incredibly?) unworldly and goes shooting off to extremes. His view of man as vile is just as foolish as the simple trust it replaces. The tragic flaw in his noble nature is that he is very silly. When an established genius seems to be saying something less than profound, as often with Brecht, it is customary for critics to refer to the quality of the language; there are indeed some flashing phrases.
The only women in Timon are dancers and a couple of whores, who do not stay long. There are none in Another Country by Julian Mitchell, and only one man; the rest are boys, nine of them. They are at a public school, probably one of the betterknown, in the Thirties. The English middle and upper classes, including me, really do enjoy recalling their schooldays with an emphasis on how they suffered, just as they are supposed to. Here it is — I was about to say 'lovingly done', but perhaps Mitchell would deny that — laid out with convincing detail then. If the language is invented it is a brilliant pastiche — words like kneesdown' for prayers and 'Jackerpot' which is won for excellence irt the corps, are not over used. Boys are told to 'take a pew' or, more severely, 'take a pull on yourself and behave like a responsible citizen'; the housemaster, Mr Farquharson, is known as 'Old Farcical'. Our heroes are Guy Bennett and Tommy Judd, about 17, so not yet in something desirable called '22'. Guy hopes to be in next year, though he is scruffier than Michael Foot, not keen, and given to adolescent cynicism and jokes that do not endear him to his seniors. 'I know I bore myself to extinction,' he sighs, 'but one did so hope one was amusing one's friends', and he certainly amused me. Richard Everett catches the awkwardness that can be graceful and the affectation that fails to conceal sincerity. Tommy is a committed man of the Left and is always having torches confiscated because he is reading Das Kapital under the bedclothes. 'I can't', he explains, 'be against the class system and be a prefect, even you must see that.' A suicide sets up enough reverberations for the first act and if the homosexuality, beating and manoeuvring for power of the second seem familiar, they are, with games, the inescapable, dominating facts of such a life.
It would be easy, if you did not read the programme, to enjoy the story and the setting and leave it at that. The programme makes it clear, however, that we are investigating how a traitor is made. Guy Bennett is a suggestion as to what Burgess may have been like when young and indeed announces his intention of being a spy and using apparent indiscretion as a cover (but surely the indiscretion of Burgess was often real?). The queer and the commie are outsiders and are not made prefects; it is at school not at university that the poison starts to work. Impossible to disprove, it seems an unlikely thesis. Thousands of public school homosexuals and left-wingers did not betray their country after all. What the group that did had strikingly in common was Cambridge, where they were recruited. Fortunately you do not have to be even intrigued with the idea to enjoy the play.
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