CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Timon of Athens. By William Shakespeare. (The Old Vic.)
WATCHING Timon was, I found, rather like going to some scandalously sophisticated party at which, halfway through, the host suddenly falls down and begins to rave from under the piano. It starts superbly, a glittering and rapacious satire on big fleas and the little fleas that bite them, and Mr. Tyrone Guthrie's clamorous production gallops breakneck to emphasise the luridity of it all, silhouetting Timon's midget pickthank toadies against the gilded background of his feasts and pomps. Rightly and unsentimentally, he never lets us overlook the upstart element in Timon's too-genial distributions of largesse ; rightly, too, he abandons all pretence that Shakespeare's Athens has any connection with the town whose walls lsocrates saved from ruin bare. Mr. Guthrie sets us firmly down in the Ben Janson territory, and the senators come frisking and mumbling on like a shady conclave of corrupt borough councillors. All this is modem in the best sense.
What follows, of course, is modern in other, less amiable ways. The berserk jeremiads with which Timon responds to the desertion of his erstwhile cronies ; his sick and shapeless railings at man's ingratitude—these have a personal, compulsive note in them, a note struck in many of the plays, from Titus Andrimieus to Lear, but else- where relieved by grace-notes from other keys. In Timon, as we would churlishly put it, the born seems to have stuck. Admittedly, as Landor conceded of Paradise Regained, muscles sometimes stand out from the vast mass of the collapsed ; there are moments of wintry, leafless poetry which eat into the mind ; and there is a situation of supreme irony when Timon, having banished himself to the wilderness, stumbles in his cave across a cache of gold—the mineral of his whole undoing. But an unhinged hero can, and here does, unhinge an entire play : the final door will not shut, and the scene is botched, hasty and somehow ashamed.
Mr. Guthrie's brilliance with the-first half looked like extending itself well into the second, until Mr. Andre Morell's Timon laid it low. As the Poet (I do not, of course, mean Shakespeare) says in Act 1 :
" No levell'd malice Infects one comma in the course I hold "
—but I must hold it long enough to insist that Mr. Morel], a sturdy and disarming actor, has nothing like the power and range demanded by Timon's disjointed miseries. Bay though he might, like some locked-out Alsatian, he could not command my sympathy, nor even, at the end, my interest. Mr. Morell's eyes seem unable to focus on us ; and his voice too lacks grip, being not a little butlerish, and possessed of a hollow, muffled timbre, as if toothache had forced him to thrust cotton-wool into his cheeks. Many lesser things, however, are finely done, among them Mr. Leo McKern's squat and spiky Apemantus, and Mr. John Phillips's robustly effeminate cartoon of a senator. All in all, this is the completest evening the Vic has given us since Tamburlayne, and the funeral, so confidently predicted, will have to be postponed.
This being a play loaded with references to sums of money, may I add how helpful it would be if the programme were to give some hint of the current exchange-rate in crowns, ducats and talents ? It is much easier, for instance, to form an opinion of a man who owes five talents when you know whether he needs, to restore his credit, a thousand pounds or eight and sixpence. Few bank-managers in the audience, for instance, would be likely to trust a man who
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