Michael Pennington
on
Timon
Royal Shakespeare Company
Opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 24 August 1999
Directed by Gregory Doran
Designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis With Sam Dastor as Poet, Richard McCabe as Apemantus, Rupert Penry-Jones as Alcibiades, and John Woodvine as Flavius
Timon of Athens is the story of a man who goes from having everything to having nothing. It is a play of two very different halves. At first, Timon has, or thinks he has, vast wealth. He lavishes extravagant gifts on a circle of flattering, apparent friends. As a result of his profligacy he becomes bankrupt. When he asks his ‘friends’ for help, they desert him.
Timon leaves Athens, enraged, heaping curses on humankind. He goes to live in a cave in the woods, dressed in rags, seeking solitude. He digs, in search of a root to eat. Instead he finds a huge stash of gold – which is useless to him because he can’t eat it. The irony is compounded as news of his renewed wealth spreads and Timon is once again invaded by grasping visitors. He dies on a lonely beach.
Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare’s later plays, probably not all his own work, but with passages written by Thomas Middleton. It appears to be an unfinished or abandoned text, that would have benefited from revision. The first performance on record was not until 1674. Since then it has rarely been produced, never popular, often adapted or with the text doctored one way or another. The play is something of an ugly duckling. However, its major attraction lies in passages of incandescent verse, especially in the second half, when Timon vents his rage against ungrateful man [4.1]:
Matrons, turn incontinent,
Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools,
Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench,
And minister in their steads! To general filths
Convert o’th’instant, green virginity:
Do’t in your parents’ eyes! Bankrupts, hold fast
Rather than render back; out with your knives,
And cut your trusters’ throats! Bound servants, steal!
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are,
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master’s bed,
Thy mistress is o’th’brothel! Son of sixteen,
Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire,
With it beat out his brains!
Other attractions are patchy. Elements of the story resemble a parable: some critics see echoes of Christ’s passion, especially when the persecuted Timon urges his creditors to ‘cleave me to the girdle… Cut my heart in sums… Tell out my blood…’ [3.4]. It has aspects in common with The Merchant of Venice, with its relentless focus on money. I was in Trevor Nunn’s 1991 production of Timon, which struck a powerful chord by being set in post-Thatcherite, money-obsessed Britain. Timon’s foolishness, abandonment, self-imposed exile and bitterness have powerful echoes of King Lear. In fact the play has been called ‘A poor man’s King Lear’ – a suggestion refuted by Michael Pennington, who prefers to call it ‘A rich man’s Timon of Athens’.
Michael loves the play and knows it intimately, having watched Paul Scofield’s performance nightly when he first joined the RSC playing small parts in 1965. Since then he has appeared in numerous starring roles for the RSC as well as co-founding the English Shakespeare Company with Michael Bogdanov. A great bonus in this interview is the impromptu masterclass he offers on the handling of Shakespeare’s texts. Away from the classics, I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on television, and of playing his father Billy Rice in a revival of Osborne’s The Entertainer. We met to record the following interview in London in January 2014, shortly before he left to perform Lear in New York.
Julian Curry: Timon of Athens has been called an unfinished mess of a text. The play has a ruined magnificence, nonetheless. Does that sound accurate?
Michael Pennington: Absolutely. I think people are too keen to apologise for it. I came across an interview with Simon Russell Beale the other day in which he was talking about Hamlet, and Lear which he was then playing, and also Timon. He said he could never forget a line of Hamlet, and he was sure he wasn’t ever going to forget a line of Lear, even long beyond the time he finishes doing it. Whereas he said he’d forgotten Timon completely, after two years. I was very surprised to hear that, with great respect, because I think Timon is unique. To me the style of it, the psychology of it, the manner of it is quite exceptional, and not just because it’s unfinished or rough, but I think it occupies a particular place of its own. I believe you do the play a great service to treat it as a unique piece, rather than something which is quite like King Lear, with echoes of Macbeth. The paradox is that it’s clearly unfinished or abandoned and put away in a drawer by Shakespeare. A lot of the first half consists of lines which are almost but not quite blank verse, and they suggest to me that if he’d gone over them again, he would have made them into coherent five-beat blank-verse lines.
You’re not mentioning any collaboration with Middleton.
I’m not so much interested in that. No doubt someone like Middleton did help him, and indeed they all worked by committee. But you can usually tell the difference, and I take the view that you always know when it’s Shakespeare. With The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare and Fletcher you know immediately which is which, by instinct as a performer. Scholars and academics analyse the text at length with word searches and all the modern tools. But you just hear the music. That may sound rather sentimental, but I think you do. When you’ve done a lot of Shakespeare you know when someone else is at work.
Given that Timon is a botched text, what did you do? Was it much cut or rearranged?
I think the thing that’s most obviously wrong (quote, unquote) with it is the second half, when Timon is in the woods or a hole in the ground or cave or wherever you put him. Despite the superb language it’s like a series of interviews with these people who keep visiting him. They all just exemplify the new state of affairs Timon is in.
I believe you tried rejigging the sequence in rehearsal?
We did. And we came to the conclusion it didn’t really matter what you did with it, because there isn’t a dramatic shape. Which means that Shakespeare really hadn’t worked it together properly. Now I’ll just pop in a theory of mine, which is that he abandoned the play because he realised what he was writing sailed close to King James’s court. That was a court in which, from what one knows of it, there was a great deal of sexual corruption, bribery, and a great deal of cash for official favours, with lobbyists everywhere. In many ways, Timon occupies the same kind of territory. And he, like James, has a kind of sexual ambiguity. So I think Shakespeare may have realised he was sailing a little too close to the wind. I’ll digress a tiny bit more, if I may.
Feel free.
In one sense the play seems to me to sit somewhere between Macbeth and Lear, because in Macbeth he was at pains to flatter James, to engage him. He writes about witchcraft, which James was much interested by. And he gives Banquo a complete makeover because in the original story he was one of the two conspirators: it was Banquo who conspired with Macbeth to kill Duncan, not Lady Macbeth. But of course Banquo was thought to be the founder of the Stuart dynasty, and James was his descendant, so Banquo had to be made good. Then you have the Porter’s reference to the ‘equivocator’ Henry Garnet, the Jesuit priest who was involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was tortured to within, well, less than an inch of his life by James. He was hung, drawn and quartered as plotter of regicide for refusing to reveal the secrets in the confessional, which of course were supposed to be sacred and confidential. There was much anti-Catholic paranoia at this point in James’s reign, which is interesting when you consider that Shakespeare himself may have been a crypto-Catholic. So I think his relationship with James must have been uneasy. There’s a certain amount of sycophancy because Garnet, the equivocator, is referred to in a hostile way by the Porter in Macbeth [2.3]. But Shakespeare is sort of swinging. He swings between pleasing James and slightly objecting. James was a great and generous patron, but I don’t think much about his court life can have appealed to Shakespeare. For instance, the actors were all made to dress up in red clothes and march in a procession when James first arrived in London.
Were they really?
Fantastic. Yeah. They were each given money to buy four and a half yards of scarlet cloth.
I wonder if I can lasso you and drag you back to Timon. It’s the only play in the canon which has virtually no female presence. Was that reflected in Greg Doran’s production?
He had the masque played by men in drag, otherwise no. As it happens I was much abused – off I go again – by Nicholas de Jongh [theatre critic of the Evening Standard], when we opened in London. He said that I, as a known heterosexual actor, was refusing to play what Greg obviously intended, which was a gay court. Now there is no basis at all for that in the script. And in any case how did he know I was a heterosexual actor? This is a very improper kind of criticism I would have thought.
Absolutely.
But that’s what he wrote. It’s a curiously impersonal play. He’s so neutral, Timon, we know nothing about him, nothing about his sexuality, nothing about his family. We don’t know where his money’s come from. He exists in a wonderful isolation and it’s difficult to tie him into anything. But I don’t think there’s a gay or, indeed, any specifically sexual agenda in the play.
So was it just de Jongh’s assumption that Greg intended that bias?
He must have taken it, I suppose, from the masque with the boys in drag.
There was nothing in the opening of the play? The first couple of scenes weren’t especially camp?
Not at all.
The flatterers could be played that way, I suppose.
They could be. But I don’t think Shakespeare was up to that, he never did it in any other play.
What about Greg? How did he work?
He worked pretty fast. The part was originally going to be played by Alan Bates in this production. I was asked to take over at short notice and I had no false pride about it. Especially in the case of Timon, which I had adored as a play since childhood. In fact, when I was eleven or twelve and I used to dress up as various Shakespearean characters and get my mother to take pictures on a Brownie box camera. The parts I chose included Hamlet, of course, there was Othello, and Lear, and curiously enough there was also Timon of Athens. I’d seen Ralph Richardson play it at the Old Vic in 1956 or ’57. Not a terribly successful production, I have to say, but something about the play really caught my attention. There’s a picture of me on our garden bench, doing the second half of Timon.
Can we put that in the book? It would be a nice companion piece to the grown-up one.
It would be lovely, yeah. You could see I’d learnt nothing in the intervening years – doing exactly the same! [Laughs.] So I’d always been fascinated by it, but the part comes up so rarely I had despaired of playing it. Then Alan got sick and I had a call from Greg I think three, maybe four weeks before they were due to open.
They’d already started rehearsal?
Very much so. And Greg was simply casting a line on to the waters, saying any possibility? I just jumped at it, and the next day I started work in Stratford. Luckily I already knew it pretty well. How do we learn our lines? I think they enter you, some parts of Shakespeare.
You’d been in the play years before, hadn’t you.
Yes. I had a cough and a spit when Paul Scofield did it in 1965. I’m sure listening to him so many times was a huge help. Anyway the learning was really not a problem, I was off the book within about a week. Greg made a space for me to join the production that was already beginning to cook. They postponed the press night by a few days, and I arrived with a sort of performance which he then modulated and adjusted. So I wasn’t in at any of the pre-planning and conceptualisation of the show.
Then you never sat around a big table for a week discussing, unravelling the text?
Not at all, no. It was a matter of racing around and doing it. I was given a terrific welcome by the cast – actors are always extremely welcoming under those circumstances.
The part is very long and taxing. I don’t suppose you had time to go into training to build up stamina?
No, but I was quite fit at that point. It was fifteen years ago, when I don’t think stamina was an issue. But I found with that part, and to some extent I still do, that performing it is all the exercise I need. If you’re about to play Lear you might think about the state of your back in relation to picking up Cordelia. If you play Antony, which I did not long ago, you’re going to get yourself into a reasonable condition, if you have time. But Timon is not that tough physically, it’s mostly vocal. I get tired doing everything else in life, but rarely get tired acting, because I find it a very interesting job so it sort of creates its own energy.
Tell me about the setting.
Stephen Brimson Lewis designed it. He made a wonderfully corrupt world, somewhere between Jacobean and Restoration, but also redolent of the 1960s. It was an invented world of tremendous fashion-consciousness, I suppose you could say quite camp in a way.
One review said ‘Brimson Lewis cheerfully pillages four centuries of fashion fads.’
That’s what he did.
So it wasn’t set in any particular period?
No. And that’s a big choice. The first half, as you say, ranged across four centuries, so it was very purposely not limited in that way. And they’d chosen an imaginary landscape for the second half. It was like a cardboard city, all remote. It served that part of the play very well because Timon’s world was just an open stage with a trapdoor at the front, and a distant sun at the back. So it was completely abstracted, it didn’t invite any comparison.
The play can have a strong contemporary relevance, can’t it, with its ‘loads o’ money’ society.
That wasn’t underlined in Greg’s production. I would rather say that what’s truly modern is the psychology of it. I can think of a couple of Timon types in our own industry. He’s a loner, terrified of his own company, who believes he can buy friendship. His generosity is embarrassing, if not annoying to his friends, in the way he can’t stop giving. Nicol Williamson came to mind in that respect. I was in his Hamlet all those years ago, and I adored him, he was the most wonderful, wonderful actor. But he was elaborately and excessively generous to the cast. If a company of actors go out for dinner you go Dutch, don’t you. But we’d go out and Nicol would always pick up the tab. You’d say ‘No, no, I really want to pay my way’, and he’d get quite angry with you.
Timon of Athens is a play of two completely different halves. The Winter’s Tale is probably the only other one that’s at all similar in that respect. Directors can either try to iron out the differences and homogenise them, or they can emphasise them and say these are two very different halves of the same play. From what you’ve been saying I imagine Greg did the latter.
I think Greg – and this is maybe typical of him – when he’s confronted by that kind of structure, is inclined to let it be as Shakespeare did, and allow you to make up your own mind. Rather like a piece of music in two movements, one in the major key and the other in the relative minor, he let them speak for themselves. He didn’t try to bind the two together particularly. The audience might conclude that it was strangely constructed, but not to the point of being unstageable or unactable, it just is odd. That Timon doesn’t die of anything in the end, is odd. He just dies. It’s like the death of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, which has no explanation. I think that intrigues people. Certainly with audiences used to seeing Shakespeare, like those in Stratford, it played very well.
Was it a challenge for you personally? Did you look to find a naturalistic line through the part to make sense of the transition, or just accept it as an extraordinary parable?
I think it’s human enough. As I was saying, we recognise the psychology of someone who wants to be loved by everybody, and tries to be so by splashing the cash. Likewise, the way he turns misanthrope after being let down by the results of his benevolence and goes to the other extreme. Apemantus has a wonderful line in the second half [4.3]. He says ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.’
He does an extraordinary volte-face. It’s extreme, isn’t it?
Extreme. As is throwing stones at your guests, however cross you are with them because they won’t pay you back. It’s very petulant.
You had a wonderful musical score.
Duke Ellington, yes – not bad from beyond the grave! I think it was originally composed for Michael Langham’s 1963 production in Stratford, Ontario.
What was so special about it?
It had those very sensual rich tonalities of Ellington’s music. There was something louche about the score, just as there’s something louche about the play, in the first half at least. It gave the thing a terrific kick. They played for about a quarter of an hour before the show, and during it of course. It was fantastic to see the RSC band behaving like Duke Ellington’s All Stars, with Cat Anderson on trumpet, and all the people I remember.
Wonderful.
I thought it was brilliant. Ellington had a Shakespearean phase. He wrote an album called Such Sweet Thunder, which is a line from the Dream, including a suite of pieces inspired by various Shakespeare plays.
One critic said your Timon was ‘like a man dozing in a bathtub of leeches. He’s sleepily aware that his friends are eating him alive, but chooses to ignore the fact, as he’s grown to love the nip of their little jaws.’
That’s brilliant. I completely accept it. I would have been proud to read it the day after we opened.
Where does his wealth come from? He can’t be a businessman, he’s too careless and impractical. It must be inherited money, surely?
I suppose it must. But it’s not as extensive as he thinks it is.
There’s no mention of a wife or family, so we assume he’s a bachelor. I was going to ask if he’s gay or sexless or a misogynist, but I guess you’ve taken care of that.
Yes, Shakespeare said to hell with all that, let’s just have a look at this man who’s isolated in every way.
Is he close to any other character?
No. Oddly enough he gets closest to Apemantus, as an opposite, in the second half. There is at least a connection between them, which is quite splendid. But no, they’re not what we would call close. He really longs for it, and makes bungled attempts to secure an intimacy with people, which are confounded by his excessiveness. At those times he behaves like a great dog, a great sloppy dog. There can be something very irritating about generosity. The people to whom he’s so generous turn against him because… I don’t know… they get annoyed by the fact that he is such a soft touch.
Is that what happens?
I think so. They despise him, that’s the thing. So they have no compunction about refusing him money when he needs it. Oh, tell him I’m a bit short this week, or I’ve just bought a new house, I’m not cash rich at the moment, they variously say. And they go back into the sauna, in Greg’s production.
You sometimes see Apemantus referred to as Timon’s alter ego. Is there anything in that?
Timon would say that he takes a bad view of everybody because of his own experience. But Apemantus is a professional cynic who does so automatically. In fact, in the cast list he’s called a ‘churlish philosopher’, as if that described his entire character. It’s unusual. A judgemental cast list like that is almost unique in the canon.
Go on.
Well, there’s a mandatory air to calling Apemantus ‘a churlish philosopher’, as there is to describing Ventidius as ‘one of Timon’s false friends’, or the three ‘flattering lords’. Shakespeare, or whoever put the cast lists together, didn’t normally do that. It gives the play the sense of a parable when you put characters in boxes like that.
Did you base your performance on anybody you knew, or knew of?
No, that doesn’t normally occur to me at all. But Timon’s parties reminded me so much of the 1960s, that was very striking. You know, those kind of parties where anything goes, sexually, pharmaceutically, with an open house to everybody. You might not even meet the host, he might be upstairs playing backgammon.
Was there much drink flowing, and drugs?
There was plenty of drinking as in a standard party, but you couldn’t put the behaviour down to that. There was a sense of laissez-faire, you know, that it was a sort of scandalous party. Timon tries to justify it or make it more palatable with his idealistic, hippyish, hopeless speeches: ‘We are born to do benefits, and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?’ [1.2]. He thinks he’s at the head of some kind of rather soppy revolution. It reminded me of woozy sixties idealism. But I also had the image of Charles Manson in my mind who, of course, looked like a hippy. Manson resembled Jim Morrison of The Doors, he could have been a rock star, with his hair and his cultishness. But instead he was an insane mass murderer. And in a funny way you could say that’s what happens to Timon. He goes from utter benevolence to utter malignancy, utter destructiveness. I kept thinking of how negative the Woodstock dream went. You know, that guy being killed at The Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert, and the Sharon Tate murders. That was when it was thought that the dream was over, right at the end of the sixties. To me there are echoes in the play.
Tell me more about the 1965 production you were in before.
It was directed by John Schlesinger. I was doing my second season at Stratford and there’s a guy – I think his name is Titus – who comes from one of Timon’s creditors, and has three lines. But there I was, having a little exchange with Paul Scofield. He was right at the absolute height of his powers, his arrival in the company was quite an event, and I watched him every night.
Did you borrow much from him?
I learned an incredible amount from watching him. One of his enormous gifts was the ability to reinvent and change things night by night according to his instincts. Not in a way that was at all destructive or difficult to deal with for anybody else. Particularly in soliloquies, such as the big speech when he leaves Athens [4.1], he would hit these thrilling fortissimos. The lamps in the theatre would be ringing with the echo of that tremendous voice. I’d think: Oh, God! And I’d say ‘Do you know what Paul did tonight, fantastic things! You really should have heard it, I’m going to go down tomorrow to watch him again.’ And of course the next time he didn’t do it at all, to my frustration. That was a real lesson, and if ever a young actor compliments me for doing likewise I’m extremely pleased.
Are you saying you’re determined not to do the same thing every night?
I didn’t determine not to do the same thing, but I determined to have the right not to, to have the liberty not to. It’s perfectly fine to do the same every night in my opinion, but he had a freedom with it. There’s a speech in the second half when he goes through a long list of animals, and most of them are mentioned twice. ‘If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee. If thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee. If thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass. If thou wert the ass…’ and he goes on like that [4.3]. Then out of nowhere comes this phrase: ‘Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury.’ That is very striking, not only because of the unicorn being a mythical beast, it’s also the only animal that is mentioned just once, which highlights it. And Scofield somehow managed to evoke this beast that none of us knows – nor whether it is a proud, angry beast or a gentle and tame beast. All I can say is that I saw a unicorn. He had that ability to open your imagination with things, often with animals. In another play he did the same thing with a jaguar. It was an absolute characteristic of his. I was taken by the idea of this other world of picture books and books of hours, mythological beasts. I did my best to borrow that.
Moving on now to Act 1, Scene 2. Timon is surrounded by flatterers, as they’re called. The Poet, the Painter and the Jeweller are being very complimentary and offering you gifts. How much does Timon focus on them? Does he really engage with them, do you think?
Not really, no. It’s surgery hour, isn’t it. He comes out into his courtyard and the Poet’s written a special poem, the Painter’s done a painting, and there’s a jeweller and a merchant. It’s like a royal tour. He praises everybody and does them favours, gives them money or buys their goods. It’s an interesting scene because even before Timon comes on, the Poet tells you what the play’s going to be about:
Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill
Feign’d Fortune to be thron’d…
When Fortune in her shift and change of mood
Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,
Which labour’d after him to the mountain’s top
Even on their knees and hands, let him flit down,
Not one accompanying his declining foot.
So in case you’re in any doubt, that’s what’s going to happen. And then Timon comes on and embodies it.
It’s like a chorus.
It’s exactly like the chorus of Romeo and Juliet, and others.
Is Timon an astute judge of the things he’s given? Does he know if they’re any good or not?
No, I don’t suppose he does. He’s a sort of connoisseur without qualification. He seems to find it difficult to concentrate, he’s always distracted by one thing or another, so he behaves like a not very professional form of royalty. If he was good at it he would really give you his full attention, wouldn’t he, and then move on to the next person. But it’s all very generalised. He’s a kind of amoeba of generosity.
All these characters who suck up to Timon and bring him gifts, were they transparent flatterers or were they apparently sincere? It makes a big difference, doesn’t it, to how gullible you appear.
It’s a tricky thing, that. The more evidently insincere they are, the more of a fool Timon is.
Exactly.
And the cast list seems to be instructing the actors to play them clearly as flatterers, as we were saying before.
That rather lessens the play, doesn’t it.
It does a bit. But maybe the point being made is Timon’s benighted nature, his inability to read character, which is part of his downfall. You might say that makes the play less than a tragedy, and perhaps it is less than a tragedy. Maybe it is about somebody who makes a mistake that a lot of us make, you know, who see the best in everybody, even though nobody else can see the best in them. I know people who will never say a bad word about anybody, even though they clearly deserve to have a bad word said about them. It’s a way of not thinking, an excuse for not using your brain, there’s a laziness in it. As to our production, I suppose the style suggested artifice and insincerity. I’m not sure any of them were people I’d want to spend an evening with or trust for long. But they all had their own qualities – one seemed more sincere and another was evidently not. However, you’ve got to leave enough leeway for Timon to be genuinely shocked, and trigger his almost psychopathic reaction of rage when they all let him down. It’s way out of proportion, just as his benevolence and generosity are out of proportion.
How do you mean, ‘leave enough leeway’?
Well, you don’t want to give up on Timon. You’ve got to go with him even if you’re shaken, shocked, even repulsed by the violence of his reaction. You mustn’t dismiss him. You might think these people are such good liars and cheats. Or you might think: How often have I misjudged people! But that’s the big question to decide: how much of an idiot is Timon, or how much is he one of us? There’s an interesting thing he does, which is to sponsor a servant of his to marry a girl of a higher caste. The poetry, the painting and the jewellery are dilettantism, but he takes an interest in the servant and helps him. Maybe it’s to show off, because Timon is as warmed by his own generosity as the people he’s generous to. He feels so good. He’s a narcissist.
Isn’t it also about romance, helping the young people to be happily in love? Perhaps they engaged him a bit more?
You certainly could play it that way.
‘Enter Apemantus.’ Timon seems to set him up. He says ‘How lik’st thou this picture, Apemantus?’ And ‘How dost thou like this jewel?’ It’s as if he is Apemantus’s feed, and he’s saying: Come on, be malicious and witty for us!
Yes, it’s part of his detachment. Apemantus is a sort of licensed jester and they all laugh at him. In this scene he’s of a piece with the Painter and all the rest of them. Your trade is poetry, your trade is jewellery, your trade is being malevolent about everybody. Let’s hear some of it! ‘Whither art going?’ – ‘To knock out an honest Athenian’s brains.’ Ha ha ha!! ‘How lik’st thou this picture, Apemantus?… Wrought he not well that painted it?’ – ‘He wrought better that made the painter, and yet he’s but a filthy piece of work.’ Ho ho ho!! Do your turn for us and we’ll all have a good laugh.
On the other hand, in the second scene it seems that Apemantus becomes a bit of a bore. Timon says ‘Go, let him have a table by himself.’
Oh yes, because that’s party time and Timon doesn’t want Apemantus to spoil things.
Fie, thou’rt a churl. Ye’ve got a humour there
Does not become a man; ’tis much to blame.
They say, my lords ira furor brevis est,
But yon man is ever angry.
Go, let him have a table by himself.
So Timon is more resistant in that context, when his whole interest is in his guests enjoying themselves.
There are echoes of the Last Supper in the text. Were they brought out in Greg’s production?
I’m not sure that they were. But do you know what… [Michael with text in hand.] I’ve somehow come away with the director’s script. And here by Apemantus’s line ‘I scorn thy meat; ’twould choke me’, it says in Greg’s handwriting: ‘Judas at the Last Supper’. So he obviously did have in mind to suggest that, but I’m not sure we pursued it. However, this was a good last supper and later there’s the bad last supper, so to speak, which turns out to be just stones and water.
So the set-up wasn’t particularly suggestive of it?
Apart from Timon being in the middle of the stage, which is probably what you’d expect, I don’t think it was. But you’re bound to be reminded of that.
The banquet is interrupted by Apemantus’s grace. I gather he used a hand mic?
Yes, he did it as a sort of riff, with music behind. I remember him going up to a box at the side with a microphone, very much like a comedian working a club. There was a slight air of cabaret about it. But if he was being a stand-up he was having a bad night because everyone just mocked him. We were all intent on having a good time, nobody wanted to listen to him.
There’s a remarkable line of Timon’s: ‘Why, I have often wished myself poorer that I might come nearer to you.’ That’s quite alienating, isn’t it.
Yes: I wish I wasn’t rich and successful, just poor like you people. They probably had to work for their money!
That seems to create the biggest chasm between him and the rest.
It does, yes. If you’re looking for a negative about Timon it’s this sense of not only offering patronage, but being patronising.
Tell me some more about the masque. The stage directions mention ‘Ladies as Amazons with lutes’, but you had pretty boys.
We had quite butch boys, actually, with hairy legs. It was fine. I don’t believe any special point was being made, there was no suggestion of sex on the stage. It was just cross-dressing entertainment, which anybody can enjoy. However, you might also look at it from a practical, industrial point of view. Because there are only two tiny female parts who come on briefly in the second half of the play, so if you don’t do the masque with men then you’ve got spare actresses for the rest of the evening. You want to tie everything together, don’t you, not have a lot of girls just doing a dance and then going home again.
At the start of Act 2 there’s an abrupt shift into the collapse of Timon’s credit-worthiness. You get to the senators, followed by Timon’s erstwhile friends, all clamouring for unpaid debts. The storm clouds are gathering.
Yes, and then Flavius the Steward comes on and Timon reproaches him [2.2]. He says:
You make me marvel wherefore ere this time
Had you not fully laid my state before me,
That I might so have rated my expense,
As I had leave of means.
And Flavius replies ‘You would not hear me.’ He says: I warned you, I warned you, I warned you, but you didn’t listen. Timon says: No, no, you didn’t warn me at all. It’s wonderful that he’s been living way beyond his means and he gets angry with the one person who’s trying to help him!
How easy-going is he about this news?
Well, the way he reproaches the Steward at first, he must be worried. But by the end of the scene, Flavius is weeping and Timon says ‘Come, sermon me no further’: It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright. And he’s quite resourceful. He says ‘And in some sort, these wants of mine – ’ in other words his bankruptcy –
are crown’d,
That I account them blessings; for by these
Shall I try friends. You shall perceive how you
Mistake my fortunes. I am wealthy in my friends.
So he says: My friends will stand by me, I will borrow money from them. He still assumes that all will be well. He’s being Dr Pangloss [from Voltaire’s Candide] – ‘All’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds!’ And then you have the scenes [3.1–3.3] in which his servants approach three flattering lords for a loan and each in turn gives a different excuse for refusing, which are very entertaining.
So there were some good laughs in the production.
Yeah. The resourcefulness is hilarious. One of them says: Is he serious? Times are hard, no one lends money without security! Be a good lad, buzz off and say you never saw me. Another says: Oh dear, how desperately unfortunate, I’ve just bought all this land, so I’m financially embarrassed. And the third says: I’m really upset with Timon. You tell me he’s already asked the other two? He should have sent to me first! I’m so offended that I’m not going to give him anything. It’s a marvellous series of inventive excuses. Each interview was set in a different milieu. I think one fellow was visited at his home. Another was in a massage parlour or sauna. You didn’t see anything going on, but the atmosphere was very louche, that’s the one I remember most vividly. They were lying on beds and all that, so the whole thing was done from a reclining position.
Good fun.
Very good fun.
Act 3, Scene 4. Very brief, but a crucial hinge of the action. Timon has a sudden explosion of rage. It seems like mayhem.
I’m in a rage, yes. ‘What, are my doors oppos’d against my passage?’
He quickly casts himself in the role of a tragic victim. ‘Cut my heart in sums… Tell out my blood.’ Were you violent?
I probably threw them around a bit. They hustle me and I throw them out the way. This is the beginning of the second half of the part. Somewhere between the previous scene with Flavius when he says everything is going to be alright and this scene, the penny has dropped. It’s quite good that you don’t see it drop, you just see the net result which is Timon in a self-righteous rage. The scales are falling from his eyes. ‘Knock me down with ’em, cleave me to the girdle… Cut my heart in sums… Tear me, take me, and the gods fall upon you!’ He’s absolutely affronted and very, very self-righteous. I guess you could say the same thing about Lear when his daughters upset him. But that’s in a different category, isn’t it.
Indeed.
It’s a pretty strange thing to say to your daughter: If you won’t let me stay the night in your house I hope your womb drops out. A bit extreme!
Timon is enraged, and he’s also quite a drama queen, isn’t he.
He’s a drama queen, yeah. There’s something very childish about him. So the challenge is, if the second half’s gonna stand up, how is the audience going to keep patience with such a man, whose mistake is so obvious and who reacts to being let down with such extravagant petulance? How are they not going to say he’s just a fool, why should we listen to him any more? It’s the old Shakespearean trick of turning the audience’s sympathies around, which we find with Lear. We find it in Richard II, come to that. He establishes a character who is really pretty deplorable, and then has him break your heart in the second half. This is invariably the tragic pattern. It happens with Macbeth, even Richard III the night before the battle.
So how does it work with Timon?
Well, as I was saying earlier, I think you’ve got to feel that you might do the same thing. I can get very upset when someone I trust lets me down. You never thanked me for my letter, or that lunch. Or professionally. Let’s say you’ve done a show and a friend was in the audience. The bastard came round afterwards and didn’t say anything! Or he saw the show and didn’t even come round! You know how touchy we can be. Your friends can say ‘Oh come on, he probably had to catch a train’, but nothing will help. Harold Pinter did this once, I’ll never forget it. He said ‘Bloody Nichola McAuliffe was in last night and she didn’t even come round.’ And someone said, well, she did have to rush off, and she left a message at the stage door for the cast, saying how marvellous she thought it was. Pinter goes: ‘Well, nobody bloody said anything to me.’ And this was from the most famous living playwright! So there is no limit to one’s petulance if one feels affronted in certain walks of life. Obviously Timon has something of the prima donna about him. But you’ve got to feel: Yes, I’m a bit like that too. You dream of revenges against people, and they can be quite dramatic like Timon’s, with the hot water and the stones.
Would you say that the audience identifies more readily with the drama queen and Christ-figure tragic victim, or the uncontrolled rage, or both?
Both. What I think probably appeals to them is the fact that he goes the whole distance. He tears his clothes off and runs away into the woods and lives on roots. He doesn’t check into a hotel or anything of that sort. He follows the logic of his misanthropy right to the end, and with only a brief flickering of humanity when Flavius comes back and Timon realises he is genuinely loved by one person. And that degree of commitment to an idea – even a self-destructive idea – is quite attractive and interesting, certainly in a play though maybe not in life. It gives the man stature.
Going on to the banquet of stones and hot water [3.6]. We discover that Timon is not just a drama queen, he’s also an actor. He dissimulates. He pretends one thing is happening when in fact something quite different is happening.
There should be a sort of unease in the air before he comes on, because they know they’ve not treated him well. Why are we being invited to dinner when we refused to lend him money? They’re gossiping together trying to work it out. How much… what did he ask to borrow from you? A thousand? And what of you? There’s a little anxiety, but then Timon disarms it. ‘With all my heart, gentlemen both. And how fare you?’ He’s extremely benevolent, just as he always was with them. Until, of course, he takes the lids off the dishes with ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap.’ Then you see what he’s up to.
Before the meal he says a grace that modulates from an apparently warm welcome into quite the reverse. How quickly do the lords cotton on to being attacked?
It’s about halfway through, isn’t it. ‘You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness.’ Everyone can agree with that. ‘For your own gifts, make yourselves praised: but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despised.’ I don’t know what that means. ‘Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another.’ A slightly uneasy reference to lending and borrowing. ‘Make the meat be beloved more than the man that gives it.’ That’s sort of gnomic. ‘Let no assembly of twenty be without a score of villains. If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of them be… [Michael delivers with a pause followed by heavy emphasis.] as they are.’ No one’s getting much of a boost here, are they! It’s getting uncomfortable, becoming an uneasy sort of banquet. People’s appetites aren’t great.
At the end of the scene, Timon throws the stones and water at his guests. How physical was that?
As physical as I could make it. It’s difficult practically, because you’ve got to have stones that look as if they could hurt people, but don’t. It’s a theatrical problem, how do you make a really convincing boulder?
What did you throw?
Some kind of heavy-duty Jablite I think, developed by the RSC props department. I had to throw the stones in such a way that they didn’t hit the floor, but went straight into the wings. Otherwise it would have let the whole scene down.
If they landed on the ground with a plop!
Difficult to do. Everybody rushing away as if they were boulders. And the water had to be cold, obviously, not steaming hot as it was supposed to be. So it’s tricky. I hope we got away with it.
Act 4, Scene 1. Outside the walls of Athens. Timon has a long diatribe of astonishing invective. The language is extraordinary. How do you inhabit it?
Well, in the same way as you’ve got to inhabit somebody who will not see the huge errors he’s made but who, when he’s disabused, will go to the trouble of constructing a fake banquet in order to throw water and stones at his friends. It’s a very melodramatic thing to do. He’s like a lot of good-natured people who can become the complete opposite with a bottle of wine inside them, or if something provokes them. Good nature, you could argue, is achieved at the cost of suppressing all the negatives, the ego, all the conflicting emotions in you. I’m sure psychologists would have something to say about the idea that you invent a version of yourself which is entirely admirable. We are all a mixture of both, aren’t we. And although Timon seems to have managed to suppress the negative side of himself earlier on, it must have been there buried inside him. The instinct to hate is as strong as the instinct to love, maybe.
Very interesting.
I hadn’t thought of it before actually, but I suppose that’s what it is. When people are saintly you wonder what it’s cost them to be saintly. What are they leaving out of the equation?
So when Timon’s lid comes off, it comes off with a vengeance.
It’s like a pressure cooker that blows. You get this sustained jeremiad which lasts the whole second half. From a dramatic point of view it’s thrilling.
Timon says ‘Nothing I’ll bear from thee / But nakedness, thou detestable town.’ Did you strip off?
I got something off. But I didn’t go all the way.
Some actors do.
Yeah. And Lear gets close to it. There’s a tactical judgement to be made about nakedness on the stage, isn’t there. It can be splendid, but it’s distracting, it takes your eye off the ball. [Laughs.] I think I ended up in a shirt and some kind of underpants. In the second half I just had a sort of loincloth.
The last line of the speech consists of the single word ‘Amen’. Was it done as a prayer?
You could do it that way, but I was on my feet and I yelled it like a curse: Fuck you! AH-MEN!! This holy word. I remember Scofield doing it with a snarl on some nights. But not always.
Was your interval after that scene?
No. There’s a beautiful little scene [4.2], which is so typically Shakespearean. Flavius and two or three servants are mopping up and realising they will probably never see Timon again. The second servant says:
As we do turn our backs
From our companion thrown into his grave,
So his familiars to his buried fortunes
Slink all away, leave their false vows with him
Like empty purses pick’d; and his poor self,
A dedicated beggar to the air,
With his disease of all-shunn’d poverty,
Walks like contempt alone.
Once again, Shakespeare has given a working man, probably not educated, one of the most beautiful short speeches in the play. Later on another servant says:
Leak’d is our barque,
And we, poor mates, stand on the dying deck,
Hearing the surges threat. We must all part
Into this sea of air.
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Two working men, two small parts. He does the same thing with the murderers in Macbeth. Shakespeare lends them his own prodigious gift of language. After Timon’s trumpet blasts it acts as a little diminuendo before the interval.
Then there’s the enormously long passage of two scenes lasting a total of 765 lines. Timon is on throughout with hardly a break.
You may go into your cave or wherever for a moment or two, but essentially you sustain the whole thing.
Such long, difficult speeches full of scabrous insults could seem merely an endless, demented rant. Is the scene overwritten? Was it cut in your version?
No I don’t think so, unless there was anything obscure. It’s great stuff. The challenge for the second half is to measure how much is rage and how much is grief. I remember Norman Rodway – a dear old pal of mine, and yours too probably – came round and said ‘There’s too much grief, that’s the easy bit, there’s not enough rage.’ And there wasn’t on that particular evening – he was always on the button. So you have to balance this tremendous aggression with the sense of profound sorrow beneath it.
These long speeches are like virtuosic arias.
They are, absolutely.
You had wonderful crits. One of them said ‘It’s a lesson in how Shakespeare should be spoken.’ What do you think was meant by that?
It’s the balance between form and content, isn’t it?
Please feel free to praise yourself.
By then I’d had about thirty-five years’ practice. I guess once you’ve done it for long enough you know the music, you know the man, you know the writer, you know what he does. You recognise when he wants you to rise to a certain thing, and when he undercuts, becomes very simple and monosyllabic in his writing. You’ve learned how to read the signs which, of course, young actors have not yet had the opportunity to do. You’re familiar with the way his antitheses work, when he’s naturalistic as we are talking now, and when he’s highly poetic. Shakespeare moved between those different tones better than anybody has ever done before or since. Some of it is high flying like Christopher Marlowe, and some is Ben Jonson at his most vernacular. No one else has done it like that. And I think after a generation or so of performing it you can sense those variations. I suppose if I did it well it’s because the form was observed, the verse worked as blank verse, the poetry was dealt with poetically enough, but that moments of ordinariness were also there. And every night you try to refind it. You have the continual job of making the character real, of making his dilemma real in a way that a modern audience can understand and connecting with the audience but, at the same time, honouring the structure that Shakespeare has given you.
It’s a challenge, isn’t it.
It is a challenge.
Is the end-stopping of lines important?
I don’t think so, although Peter Hall would say it is. There’s a huge mystique built up about how to do the verse, people are very doctrinaire about it. But when you consider Shakespeare’s public, especially during the Globe years – he was dealing with an audience some of whom could speak Latin and, I don’t doubt, Greek as well, and others couldn’t read at all. He had to communicate with them all at the same instant, so he needed a form that would carry all the naturalness and also the poetry, and came up with blank verse. This is the form of verse that is most like ordinary speech. We use blank verse every time we speak. We talk in iambic pentameters all the time. So I always veer away from theories about whether you should breathe at the end of a line or in the middle of the line or what you should do. I find that, like jazz, you can extend a phrase as long as you have within it the time signature… [Tapping out a beat on the table.] You can retard it, or you can accelerate. The rhythm is flexible. You’re pretty safe to move around within it if you want to, but there are certain things you should not do because they just make a mess of the line. ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question.’ You wouldn’t want to emphasise the ‘is’, although in theory, iambically speaking, it’s a strong beat. Pushing through to the end of the sentence is also important, because Shakespeare’s was not an age of soundbites. He sometimes took four lines to come to the point of what he’s saying.
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them.
That’s four and a half lines, isn’t it. Technically you’ve got to have the breath to drive through to the end, and also an intellectual grasp of the thing. I think if one were to generalise about young modern actors, there is the problem that nowadays we do think in soundbites. We communicate by texts and tweets and emails, we talk in short bursts, we’re not used to sustaining ideas over a long sentence, and Shakespeare does that all the time. Therefore you’ve got to be ready technically and, in a way, emotionally. So I guess it’s a mixture. I suppose what I did was believable and adequately realistic, but it honoured the poetic form of Shakespeare doing his stuff.
Tell me about the second-half setting. I believe you had a giant sun.
Great disc of a sun.
Did it have much effect on you?
Yeah. I felt that he was out in a hot place. The scene opens with ‘O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth / Rotten humidity.’ I liked to think of it as a desert heat, so I did a sort of blistered body make-up. It was quite red and painful, exposed, weathered. I wanted him to be uncomfortable and burnt rather than just dirty in the way you often see in Shakespeare productions with a lot of Fuller’s earth and muck. I felt it should be raw.
How were the woods and the cave represented? What else did you have on the stage?
The tones were reds, deep reds and yellow, sort of ochre-ish, burnt sienna. I was in a pit in the ground which opened like a trap at the front of the apron. The stalls could see me from the crotch upwards. That’s where I found the gold and the root. Sometimes I’d jump out. We didn’t want any artificial structures like caves.
So there was no realistic cave?
No, nothing at all. Nor trees.
In the last act you mention one.
Yes, ‘I have a tree which grows here…’ He talks about it.
So it was offstage?
Yes. But why has he got a tree anyway? I reckon that’s Shakespeare looking out of his study at Stratford and seeing the mulberry tree in his garden and thinking I’ll have a tree!
There’s a savage irony early on when you’re digging for roots, looking for something to eat, and come across gold. That must have been a good laugh.
It’s hysterical. The audience loved it.
Was it also amusing to Timon?
Yeah. In his ghastly, black, satirical, sarcastic way he thinks it’s a scream. And then he feels in control in his own little kingdom in the woods because he’s holding the trump card, he has this big stash of gold. ‘Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold.’ Word is soon out back in Athens that he’s got it. He assumes that everyone who comes to visit him wants it. And then he philosophises at great length about gold.
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th’accurs’d,
Make the hoar leprosy ador’d, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench.
Very good stuff!
He veers away from his fury with the flatterers and their ingratitude.
That’s right. It’s just a lot of metaphor, with savage philosophising and strong images.
This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again.
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’April day again.
He’s being given Shakespeare’s imagination at this point. Timon of Athens wouldn’t have the poetic flair to make up stuff like that, but the author has lent him his talent.
That’s something he acquires in the second half of the play, I think.
Absolutely. And I suppose this wonderful language sustains it as much as anything, a bit like Lear on Dover Beach. It’s just astonishing writing, you could listen to it all night.
In the first half of the play he needed company and perhaps even feared loneliness, now he craves solitude and is invaded by a stream of greedy visitors. Alcibiades arrives with his two whores and says ‘His wits / Are drown’d and lost.’ Is that true, do you think? Does he actually go mad?
I wouldn’t say so. No.
It’s just Alcibiades’s perception?
Well, how sincere is Alcibiades being? Maybe it’s like if your girlfriend is bothered by some crazy guy in the street, you might say ‘Look, he’s off his rocker.’ In fact, Timon’s talking lots of sense. He’s just being terribly rude.
Did you, Michael, ever consider playing Timon as mad?
No, I didn’t. Not as Lear is mad, whatever that may be. But often in Shakespeare going mad actually involves going sane. When people go mad they tend to talk much better sense. Ophelia does, in a way. So no, I never thought of that. I might have lost the audience if I had.
He reacts to the whores appallingly, doesn’t he.
Yes.
It’s absolutely gross. Do you think talking dirty to them gives him any kind of sexual kick? How did you treat them physically?
I might have made them kiss each other, but I didn’t get excited by them. There often is in Shakespeare, isn’t there, a kind of sexual disgust that surfaces in extremis. Lear does the same thing at Dover [4.6], about whores.
Behold yond simpering dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name.
That easily invades Shakespeare characters, and you find it in the sonnets as well, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (number 129), for instance. Maybe it’s something Shakespeare had a particular tendency towards. I don’t think I did anything except try to make them feel bad about what they did for a living. But they didn’t feel bad about it, of course. They didn’t think: Oh God, we must stop being prostitutes. They were camp followers with the army. They were doing okay as long as Alcibiades took care of them.
But the stream of abuse towards them came from your head rather than the lower part of your body?
Yes, I would say so. Because after all it’s not connected as it is in Lear with female betrayal, by his daughters. In Lear’s case there is a sexual side to the disgust. But there’s no feminine presence in Timon up to this point, so I think it would be a red herring to suggest that he gets some kind of kick out of the situation.
Fair enough. Alcibiades and the whores go off and Timon’s alone again on stage. He digs away.
Yes. It’s wonderful to start up again, talking to the earth.
Common mother – thou
Whose womb unmeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all…
It’s incredibly poetic.
He suddenly exclaims ‘O, a root! – Dear thanks.’
That’s right, yeah. I found a sort of turnip. No, it was more like a parsnip. That was another big laugh. You look out for them, don’t you, the laugh on finding the gold, the laugh on finding the root. You get credit for that.
You look forward to it.
Yeah, look forward to it. [Happy chuckle.]
So on comes Apemantus. He says ‘Men report / Thou dost affect my manners.’ That’s not true, is it.
No. It’s like saying: You’re crowding my space, you’re trespassing on to my patch. I’m the cynic around here, and I hear you’re pretending to be Apemantus. This is a professional invasion!
He also says ‘This is in thee a nature but infected; / A poor unmanly melancholy sprung / From change of fortune.’ In other words, Timon’s misanthropy is enforced by his changed circumstances, and not the real thing.
Mm. That’s what he thinks.
And later on ‘Thou’ldst courtier be again, / Wert thou not beggar.’ But it’s surely not true either, because Timon’s got gold, so he could be a courtier again if he wanted to.
Does Apemantus know he’s got gold by then?
I don’t think so, no.
We certainly should believe that Apemantus means it. In his judgement it wouldn’t take much to put Timon back into his first-half state, so that’s a criticism that could be just. He sees an extremist who could repeat his mistakes over and over again, so that if you replayed his whole life it would just be a huge, vicious circle. But I don’t think we in the audience necessarily agree, because how would he go back? What’s been uncovered is something psychological in him, so I think we listen to it and say to ourselves: That’s quite a good judgement; but we’ve seen more of Timon than you have, Apemantus, and it may not be true.
Do you think there’s any moment when Timon considers going back to being a courtier, once he’s rich again?
No, I don’t believe so.
It doesn’t seem to be in the text.
No, it doesn’t at all. That’s become his past. Apemantus is astute but he’s not always right about Timon, which is what makes this argument so good. It’s very interesting because you go from side to side as you listen to it. Next you get Timon’s point of view. He says
Thou art a slave, whom Fortune’s tender arm
With favour never clasp’d, but bred a dog.
Hadst thou, like us from our first swathe, proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drudges of it
Freely command, thou would’st have plung’d thyself
In general riot, melted down thy youth
In different beds of lust, and never learn’d
The icy precepts of respect, but followed
The sugar’d game before thee.
Speaking of long thoughts expressed in long sentences, there’s a fine example! He’s saying you’ve never had money, so you don’t know what you’re talking about; I have had money, so I know what it’s like to lose it.
This is the best scene in the play, isn’t it?
Oh yes, by miles.
It’s the only time Timon is confronted properly. The one scene with real dramatic tension.
That’s right. You’ve got two people instead of one, and it really stands out. Audiences welcome it at half past nine in the evening! There’s an actual discussion going on about what Timon’s doing. It’s brilliant.
Timon starts eating his root, and Apemantus says ‘Here; I will mend thy feast.’ In Greg Doran’s production he brought on a picnic plus a towel, a mat to lie on, suncream and sunglasses. I’m sure it was very amusing…
I think I would question it too. I don’t know how much of that was Greg and how much was Bill McCabe, who played Apemantus, a great colleague. It was certainly very funny but maybe it… maybe not. I don’t quite know what it meant.
Not justifiable, perhaps.
What’s justifiable in these things? Is a massage parlour justifiable?
Okay, touché. Discuss! The text soon changes from verse to prose. Any particular reason why it should do so?
That happens when Apemantus says this most telling line, ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.’ You think: That’s interesting. And then what follows for the next couple of pages is a genuine debate that goes to and fro. Timon has his wonderful speech about the animals, saying that whoever you are, wherever you are on the scale of creation, somebody is above you and somebody is below you. And somebody will destroy you, and no one’s going to help you. It’s a real forensic argument as opposed to a rhetorical one. I suppose that’s why Shakespeare goes into prose.
At one point, Apemantus asks ‘What things in the world can’st thou nearest compare to thy flatterers?’ And Timon replies with another question: ‘What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?’ They suddenly seem to enjoy a relaxed togetherness.
That’s right. Because they have a certain amount in common, they’re a match for each other. They play a little game: If you were King, what would you do?
There are interesting twists and turns of mood. The sparring reminds me somewhat of Beatrice and Benedick, or Kate and Petruchio, in the way they do a kind of mating dance of insults.
Absolutely.
Almost like a vaudeville routine.
Yes. And it’s very invigorating to play. We love it in the theatre but don’t necessarily enjoy it so much in real life, you know, the thrust and parry. But yeah, there is as you say something between them. There’s perhaps a growing closeness, which they both reject in the end because they’re more comfortable abusing each other. They’re not two men who will suddenly find friendship and intimacy easy, and they back away from it. But for a moment you think these are absolute birds of a feather, even though they have serious reservations about each other.
Finally, a volley of abusive one-liners.
They just get pissed off with each other and compete in insults:
TIMON: I had rather be a beggar’s dog than Apemantus.
APEMANTUS: Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.
TIMON: Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.
APEMANTUS: A plague on thee! Thou art too bad to curse.
TIMON: All villains that do stand by thee are pure.
APEMANTUS: There is no leprosy but what thou speak’st.
TIMON: If I name thee. I’ll beat thee. But I should infect my hands.
APEMANTUS: I would my tongue could rot them off!
TIMON: Away, thou issue of a mangy dog! Choler does kill me that thou art alive; I swound to see thee.
APEMANTUS: Would thou would burst!
TIMON: Away, thou tedious rogue! (He throws a stone at APEMANTUS.) I am sorry I shall lose a stone by thee.
APEMANTUS: Beast!
TIMON: Slave!
APEMANTUS: Toad!
There’s a similar exchange in Waiting for Godot. Timon just shouts him down with ‘Rogue, rogue, rogue!’ Then he does another abrupt change into ‘I am sick of this false world’ – and becomes simple and lyrical:
And will love nought
But even the mere necessities upon’t.
Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave;
Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat
Thy gravestone daily.
Rather lovely. And so he shifts out of that.
Off goes Apemantus, and a gang of thieves enter. Timon seems to welcome them.
‘Yet thanks I must you con / That you are thieves profess’d, that you work not / In holier shapes.’ In other words: I’m glad you’re not pretending to be priests. You are bandits, thieves. You’ve got spotted kerchiefs and cloth caps, so at least that’s honest. I know where I am with you, unlike those fuckers back in Athens, who pretend to be friends but aren’t friends.
Then Flavius the Steward arrives.
That’s a nice interlude. Eventually Timon believes he’s genuinely trying to help. It’s the one moment when he shows a certain affection and gentleness.
What, dost thou weep? Come nearer then; I love thee…
Had I a steward
So true, so just, and now so comfortable?
It almost turns my dangerous nature wild.
But he can’t get off the negativity even when he’s being generous, and at the end of the scene he says:
Go live rich and happy;
But thus condition’d: thou shalt build from men;
Hate all, curse all, show charity to none.
So his idea of a blessing is to say: Here’s lots of money, go away and be even more misanthropic than me. He’s not saying settle down in the country and have a family. But I think I embraced him, which is something Timon never did at any other time. So it’s a little bit of a grace note.
On come the Poet and Painter, and Timon is off stage briefly. You had a little rest!
Well, hardly.
Did you have time for a pee?
No.
What did you do? Did you have time for a glass of Guinness?
Like a good old actor laddie! [Laughs.] I think I lay down in my hole, but folks in the upper circle could probably see me. The Poet and Painter are after gold as well, aren’t they.
Of course, yeah. A note in the Oxford edition says there is probably a homoerotic undercurrent to the language in this scene.
That didn’t strike me.
Fair enough. Timon repeatedly calls them ‘honest men’. He pretends, he’s being an actor again. Over and over again he calls them honest, just as Othello does about Iago. But of course the difference is that Timon is being ironic, which Othello isn’t.
That’s right. He leads them on into believing he’ll give them commissions and money. But this is where the second half gets a little wearisome, it doesn’t have the same vitality. It’s a lengthy stretch, and if I was directing I’d wonder about making some quite heavy cuts. We tried transposing a couple of scenes during the previews, and putting the Poet and Painter in a bit earlier, but it didn’t seem to make any difference one way or the other. It’s so obvious what they want. As good as the actors were, I thought ‘Enough already’. Or ‘Nearly enough already’! To the extent that the second half works, it’s sustained by the vitality of Timon’s language and his irony and his energy. But there’s less of them in these scenes. Timon is less entertaining, until the end when he offers to help the senators. At least they’re after something different.
They want him to lead the troops against Alcibiades.
But it’s too late because Timon’s stuck in his groove.
He taunts the senators, doesn’t he.
Yes. He says ‘I will some kindness do them. / I’ll teach them to prevent wild Alcibiades’ wrath.’ The senator says ‘I like this well; he will return again.’ Then Timon:
I have a tree, which grows here in my close
That mine own use invites me to cut down,
And shortly must I fell it.
Tell my friends, Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree
From high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither ere my tree hath felt the axe,
And hang himself. I pray you, do my greeting.
It’s a very good bit, that!
Close to the end Timon says ‘Lips, let four words go by and language end.’ Any idea what those four words are?
I changed the text, resting my case on the fact that an ‘s’ in Jacobean script was very similar to an ‘f’. So I said ‘let sour words go by’.
Aha!
In fact Nicholas Rowe, who was the first editor of Shakespeare, also amended it to sour. He probably used the same argument. In any case why would it be ‘four words’? That doesn’t make sense. You don’t want to puzzle the audience with your final lines, and leave them wondering: What did he mean by ‘four words’?
There’s a calmness and lyricism to the final scene, which suggests that he’s beyond rage and suffering. On the other hand, I read about another Timon, somebody in America, who bit his own tongue off at the very end.
So easy to do. [Laughs.] I suppose he must have finished speaking by then?
I think he probably had, yes. Did you go in that direction at all?
I’m old-fashioned. I remember when I was in my garden aged eleven dressed up as Timon, what I loved in the way of an early adolescent was:
Come not to me again, but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.
Well, that’s lovely and it’s quite new in him, isn’t it. It’s lyrical in the extreme. Then finally:
Thither come,
And let my gravestone be your oracle.
Lips, let sour words go by and language end.
What is amiss, plague and infection mend.
Graves only be men’s works and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams, Timon hath done his reign.
That’s what you want them to remember.
Absolutely. His death is unexplained in the text, like that of Enobarbus, as you said. But he clearly anticipates it, even wills it. Did you decide what Timon died of?
No. I didn’t feel I needed to. It seems to me to be a non-realistic death. What does Enobarbus die of? I’m not sure. A broken heart? Shakespeare was perfectly capable of writing a death scene with all the symptoms, he just chose not to. He was obviously on to something else in both those instances. He was taking risks towards the end of his writing, breaking all the rules. Breaking the verse rules and breaking the probability rules, just to set himself new tasks.
Timon changes enormously during the course of the play. But do you think he learns?
He doesn’t seem to. And I suppose that is the final judgement on the play, as opposed to Lear. We like plays in which people learn from experience, and come round to saying, as Lear does [3.4]:
Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this.
Timon has nothing like that. However, it is, in a way, a braver piece of writing because you don’t get that benediction of someone having learned. It’s uncomfortable. He stays in the memory because he doesn’t really change. But what does come through powerfully is the astonishing vitality of his speech.
How much does the audience identify and sympathise with Timon? Is he a genuinely tragic character, would you say?
I think you leave him with an awed respect and a certain sense of fellowship. It’s the sort of guarded kinship you feel also with Coriolanus, perhaps, or Henry V. These are difficult, flinty protagonists, they don’t have Hamlet’s wit and charm, or Richard II’s articulacy and vulnerability. They’re much tougher. So I think you have a respect for him because of his endurance, his commitment to an idea, to the purity and integrity of the journey that he sets out for himself. It’s an odd thing to say given how stupidly he’s behaved, but there’s something of the tragic hero about that, even though it doesn’t break your heart as it should in Lear. When it came to Lear, Shakespeare put a family around him and made them the crucible. But with Timon those coordinates aren’t there, he doesn’t bother with any of that. In the end I suppose it limits the play, but Shakespeare wrote in a slightly different key, or for a different instrument each time he set about these tragic protagonists. Timon is sometimes called a second-class Lear. I prefer to think of him as first-class Timon.
