THEATRE
I HATE PEOPLE; OR TIMON OF ATHENS
Leura Everglades, January 6
Till January 21
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★★
This explodes like a brand new star within the firmament of the most effective Shakespeare productions I’ve seen. It has a fact, an vitality and a ferocity to make the blood drain out of your face, and it additionally raises the query, why is Timon of Athens essentially the most ignored of Shakespeare’s performs?
Famous US educational Harold Bloom noticed that Timon “phases higher than it reads”, however that’s solely true if the manufacturing has a protagonist whose tragedy gouges your eyes and makes your ears bleed; a Timon courageous sufficient to pull you to the brink of what it means to be human. And Margaret Thanos’ Sport for Jove manufacturing has that in Damien Ryan. Right here Ryan takes his artwork to a brand new stage; to 1 that few actors obtain on any stage wherever. Visceral, uncooked, compelling and transferring, it is a efficiency you received’t neglect.
Damien Ryan’s Timon has fact, vitality and a ferocity to make the blood drain out of your face.
Credit score: Kathy Luu
In reviewing Shakespeare, one normally doesn’t hassle with the plot, however Timon’s obscurity makes it value explaining that the titular character is famend as an extravagant host and giver of items. Generosity being a stronger go well with of his than knowledge, he runs himself into chapter 11, and should beg favours from these “mates” upon whom he’s bestowed such beneficence. Now he finds these mates had been merely sycophants who cold-shoulder him, and so he renounces Athens and retreats to the wilds to dwell in abject poverty.
It’s the solely Shakespeare play (one presumably co-written with Thomas Middleton) to have a two-act construction, even when it’s introduced in written kind with the standard 5. And that second act, when Timon the altruist has contorted into Timon the last word misanthrope, is in some ways the darkest within the canon. If it lacks the swelling evil of Macbeth, it arrives at a confronting nihilism that’s a direct forebear of Samuel Beckett’s work.
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The primary half, in contrast, is a satirical comedy, replete with the dramatic irony of our with the ability to see the folly of Timon’s methods and the fatuousness of his company, whereas he lives in a stupor of recognition (the parallel with modern social media being alarming).
Thanos (who’s renamed the present, presumably for advertising enchantment) has a eager eye for speaking that means by motion, and she or he provides us a recent Athens of false bonhomie and lewd extra. The out of doors efficiency’s timing is ideal: the frothy first act performs because the solar lingers, whereas darkness has fallen for the second.
Amongst a forged of 12, Deborah Galanos is excellent as Timon’s (gender-swapped) unfailingly loyal steward, Flavia, as is Mike Sales space because the intellectually tinder-dry Apemantus. However, as Macbeth owns his play, so Timon owns this, and Ryan breaks our hearts repeatedly, with Timon’s bare soul mirrored in his bare physique.
The play is a savage indictment of greed and hypocrisy, ending with an added coda of a dog-eat-dog world, and the manufacturing stands on the pinnacle of Shakespeare in Sydney this century.
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