When it comes to staging old plays for a 21st century audience, many directors and producers try updating the settings to make them more "relevant" to modern audiences. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. One recent modernisation that seems to have worked quite well just closed at the National Theatre in London, their production of Timon of Athens, with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. The nature of the updating can probably be summed up in one phrase:
Shakespeare meets Occupy London
The final performance of this production was digitally transmitted as part of the NT Live program(me). I recently saw the "tape delayed" version at the movie theater. More below the flip....
If you want to read some reviews of the production:
1. Michael Billington, The Guardian
2. Susannah Clapp, The Observer
3. Paul Taylor, The Independent
4. Claudia Pritchard, The Independent
A preview article, also by Paul Taylor of The Independent, quotes SRB in his analysis of Timon's character, picking on a key flaw:
"Timon completely misunderstands what true friendship involves. He absolutely equates it with profligate gift-giving."
SRB also brought this up in the video feature before the start of the play.
It's pretty clear what fair-weather "friends" Timon has as the play progresses, since he starts rich, or at least seemingly rich, with everyone from business to artsy types fawning on him. In turn, Timon dispenses largesse that's established with the opening scene set in the "Timon Room" of what's meant to be the National Gallery. You can watch this video of SRB visiting the National Gallery, with comments on the play:
There is confusion in that the play is called Timon of Athens, but all the contemporary updates are meant to evoke modern London. Go figure. That aside, the painting reproduced in that opening scene is El Greco's "Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple". Not subtle symbolism if you recognized the painting immediately (I admit that I didn't), but fitting.
Of course, the "seemingly rich" description is the key here, since Timon's loyal steward Flavia (originally Flavius, but gender-bent into Flavia in this production) knows the truth about Timon's finances, namely that he's spent out to the hilt and is in debt up to his eyeballs. She apparently has tried to tell him before, but Timon apparently will have had none of it.
When the truth starts to dawn on Timon, he thinks that he'll be able to ask his friends for help:
"You shall perceive how you mistake my fortunes;
I am wealthy in my friends." (Act 2, Scene 2)
Of course, it doesn't turn out that way, as everyone whom Timon asks for loans turns him down. After all, he doesn't have any money any more, and therefore he is of no value to them, in every sense. Hence the disgusting offerings on the guest's plates in the Part I banquet climax. Timon falls far, and hard, reduced to vagrancy in the 2nd half of the play.
Although an allusion to the mash-up of Shakespeare (and co-author Thomas Middleton) with the Occupy movement appeared at the start of the production, with an Occupy-style tent camp in full view of the audience before the first line, as well as moments of Occupy crowds harassing the rich and mighty in a few moments, it's only in the 2nd half that the combination with Occupy allusions comes into full force. The production makes the Athenian captain Alcibades a leader of the downtrodden and thus of the play's "Occupy" element. One would then think that Alcibades would lead the Occupiers in a full-scale revolt against the "1%" that turned out Timon.
Yet it's not that simple, partly because the play's structure doesn't allow it to be. In Act 4 of the play, Timon, in exile in his cave, discovers a hidden stash of gold. Transposed into a contemporary production with Timon rummaging around slums, this discovery makes no sense whatsoever in terms of literal narrative. Yet here, once you ignore that aspect (and the production pretty much does, as there's no alternative), the discovered gold murks matters up in terms of the Occupy aspect. At first, Timon hides the gold. But when he is confronted by Alcibades and the Occupiers, as Paul Mason puts it in his excellent commentary in The Guardian (emphasis mine):
'When Timon, in the wilderness, encounters Alcibiades's troops – whom [director Nicholas] Hytner supplies with baseball bats and Molotovs – he uses gold to corrupt their revolt. He urges the men to "mince" the children of Athens and the whores among them to "infect" Athenian men. They, in turn, reply frankly: "We'll do anything for gold." They surge off, behind Alcebiades, who duly triumphs.'
Mason noted, in the passages just before and after the above, how there is a conflict between the staging and the text:
"But there are crucial differences between Timon's Athens and the London of 2012: there is a powerful mob in Shakespeare's play, with a capable leader – Alcibiades. In the end, this leader conquers the city, is absorbed into the ruling group and, with Timon dead, society is healed. Today – in London and across Europe – it's impossible to predict a happy ending, because the nature of the "mob" has changed....
But what characterised the revolts that have kicked off since 2008 is their hostility to leadership, and the willingness to abandon an action should it lead in the direction of hierarchy, power-games or engagement with mainstream structures.....
Hytner's mob might wear hoodies, sleep in the pop-up tents of the indignado camp, but they are textually obliged to behave as a 17th-century mob – trailing gormlessly behind the man they will put in power. The contrast between this and the real modern crowd – armed with Blackberries and Flickr streams – is telling."
At the end of the play, the powers-that-be have offered to Alcibades an apparent sacrificial list of people to "cull", in order to gain peace, or at least a cessation of hostilities. Thus at the end, Alcibades and one of his lieutenants are seen in business suits, at a press conference, where they announce the (off-stage) death of Timon at play's end.
This tension and contradiction brings forth what seems to me to be an inherent contradiction in the Occupy movement and its power to change things (or not). On the one hand, the Occupy movement wants to effect reforms in "the system" and to be uncorrupted by the structures of power, financial, political and otherwise. Yet how does one do that by staying outside of "the system"? The susceptibility of the mob in this production to the secret gold that Timon has found, and the apparent co-opting of Alcibades at the end, illustrates some of the complex meta-issues involved.
Looking at our system, you only have to look at the political antipodes of the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party. The latter moved into the corridors of power big time in 2010, which we've all discovered to our cost. All of us can name Tea Party Representatives and Senators (note the unfortunate plural). By contrast, can you name someone who specifically refers to her/himself as an "Occupy Representative" or an "Occupy Senator"? The closest respective people might be Alan Grayson and Elizabeth Warren, but again, refer back to the question about whether they describe themselves, or are described, as such.
Interestingly, since the Tea Party is ultimately about the obsessive valuing of money over all other human values (OK, yes, there's the Obama Derangement Syndrome, racism, and all out bigotry too, but let's limit the scope for now), Mason's article notes, with regard to the role of money in Timon of Athens:
'For Timon of Athens is not primarily about money. Marx got it right when he wrote that the play was about the "power of money". Money, for Timon, is the means of creating and lubricating a power network. He springs Ventidius out of jail with five grand, secures a marriage for his servant with 20, responds to a gift of greyhounds from a powerful contact with "fair reward".
When he goes bust, all he asks for are loans of ready money – liquidity, in banking parlance. But neither the senator, nor the toff, nor the Hooray Henry he has bailed out in the past are prepared to stump up. Neither is the state.
Timon – like Lehman Brothers – goes bust because of what appears as a liquidity crisis. But, as with Lehman, this masks a deeper collapse. Once Timon can no longer supply his social network with gallery openings, soft-porn ballet and massive overpayments for menial services, his social value is zero. Which makes the play's revival as a satire on London in 2012 all the more relevant. Shakespeare had grasped something about the crisis of his time that some politicians and economists are still not prepared to confront about ours.'
And none of us are immune or above the power and role of money in modern society. I wonder how many people on DK bought tickets for the recent PowerBall jackpot, for example. (I didn't.)
I'd never read or seen a production of Timon of Athens before, so I came to this viewing with a totally clean slate and no preconceptions. Fortunately, when you have the National Theatre involved, you're going to a slate of terrific actors pretty much regardless. SRB is worth watching in anything, of course, and you can get even more of a sense of how smart he is from this article from The Observer, reported by Megan Conner. Perhaps Deborah Findlay was just a shade over the top in her style as the ever-loyal Flavia (in the video above, she's the woman in the red dress), but to see her loyalty to Timon is touching, even when in the long dark night in the 2nd part, there are moments when Timon seems to be meta-throwing her under the bus. There's an interesting twist when Ciaran McMenamin takes the role of a Merchant in Part I, using what seems to be a slightly southern American accent, only to revert to what I presume is his natural Irish accent when he becomes Alcibades later on.
This production is definitely a clear example of how theater can reflect the real world and comment on it, even if it can't necessarily change things. The latter part is up to us, of course, and ain't easy. (I don't ever see any theater piece, or TV show or a movie, leading to stricter gun control regulation, for example.)
So, since this is nominally a mash-up of 2 of 3CM's normal series, you can either observe the usual SNLC protocol (although given yesterday, that might seem even tackier than usual) or comment on the diary or the play. Although given what happens to Timon in the course of the play, inclusion of the play in the SNLC 'canon' is somewhat appropriate....