When Anna and I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, the first show I was in was Timon of Athens, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Paul Scofield. Although we were only supernumeraries this was a heady beginning. Scofield was an actor I had admired tremendously for many years and that admiration kept growing during the time I worked with him. I stood in the wings every moment I was off stage and watched his performance as Timon. He had a natural grace and beauty on stage as well as the most remarkable and idiosyncratic voice. It would range up and down the scale like a bird trying to find foothold on a cliff-face, and sometimes produce the most unexpected intonations. He was like that in rehearsal too—constantly testing inflexions, repeating phrases over and over to achieve the most expressive cadence. He never produced sound ‘trippingly on the tongue’ like an Ian Richardson. Rather, the voice was dredged up torturously from some deep inner well of turbulence and uncertainty. He could project a warmth and generosity of spirit like no actor I’ve ever seen and could also retreat into a reptilian stillness and watchfulness or explode unexpectedly like a summer’s storm:

. . . His voice was propertied as all the tunéd spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, he was as rattling thunder.

He had a quiet dignity and easygoing authority and brought a sweetness of temperament into the rehearsal room that made him one of the most popular among his fellows that I’ve encountered. If you want to get a feeling of his personality, I can vouch that his performance in A Man for All Seasons is as close as you could get to the man himself, which is no doubt why it was such a classic performance.

I felt a sense of loss with the deaths of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson, all of whom I admired greatly over many years, but it was the death of Paul Scofield that affected me the most deeply and gave rise to an anguished, ‘Oh, no!’

Timon is one of the least performed of Shakespeare’s plays. It is even more bleak and cynical than Troilus and Cressida. It was probably co-written with the young Thomas Middleton around 1608. Shakespeare was a professional playwright, not an aristocratic dilettante. At various times in his career (while jealous of his intellectual property) he was not averse to collaborating, providing fodder for the hungry theatre machine. Henslowe’s diary records that of eighty-nine plays at the Swan, thirty-four were by a single author. The other fifty-five were collaborations.

This was the period of Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist, both savage satires on greed and hypocrisy. Shakespeare was cashing in on their popularity with his Timon, a simple parable about a rich playboy who flings around his money. While he does so, friends and sycophants flock to his table. But when the money runs out, they all desert him and Timon, in misanthropic rage, retreats to a cave in the forest where he rails against man’s ingratitude:

The learnéd pate

Ducks to the golden fool. All’s oblique:

There’s nothing level in our curséd natures

But direct villainy. Therefore be abhorr’d

All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!

His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains,

Destruction fang mankind!

Ironically, as he scrabbles in the earth looking for roots to eat, Timon discovers a hoard of gold. Word of this gets out and various fair-weather friends come scurrying back for a handout. Timon pelts them with money and drives them off with curses. He dies a miserable and lonely death, hardened in his misanthropy. The one person whose company he tolerates for a while is the cynic Apemantus. In the old days Timon used to laugh at Apemantus’s bitter diatribes; now he can out-rail him.

In Schlesinger’s production Paul Rogers played Apemantus, and the chief delight of the evening was in watching him and Scofield playing off each other, especially in their final confrontation in the forest:

Timon: What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?

Apemantus: Give it the beasts, to be rid of the men.

Timon: Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?

Apemantus: Ay, Timon.

Timon: A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t’attain to. 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, thy dullness would torment thee, and still thou lived’st but as a breakfast to the wolf. If thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee, and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury. Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse. Wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard. Wert thou a leopard, thou wert german to the lion, and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life; all thy safety were remotion, and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!

For all its grim satire, Timon seems to me to be a very modern play and one right for our times. Following the so-called Global Financial Crisis of 2008 there was a lot of breast-beating, soul-searching and finger-pointing about unbridled greed and a paucity of ethics in the banking sector. Some voices on the left gleefully pronounced the death of capitalism. There was much hue and cry about capping executive salaries. The crisis more or less passed for most people, at least in Australia. Consumer confidence picked up again, and criticism of executive salaries and golden handshakes became more subdued as we all went back to our old ways.

Australia, for all its much-vaunted egalitarianism, maintains a superstitious reverence for those who make the Rich List, and plutocrats like the late Richard Pratt and the late Kerry Packer achieve a state of beatification despite well-aired reservations about their characters and financial dealings. As Lear so neatly puts it:

Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtles breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.

Timon of Athens should be seen more often.

No other writer, and with the exception of Mozart, no other artist, has brought us so close to the heart of the ultimate mystery of the universe and of man’s place in it; no other has felt and presented the numinous with such certainty and power, no other penetrated so deeply into the source from which he derived his genius and from which we all, including him, derive our humanity. The ultimate wonder of Shakespeare is the deep, sustaining realisation that his work, in addition to all its other qualities—poetical, dramatic, philosophical, psychological—is above all true. It is hardly surprising that he, alone among mortals, has conquered mortality, and still speaks directly to us from lips that have been dust for hundreds of years, and a heart that stopped beating to mortal rhythms on St George’s Day 1616. He alone has defeated the last enemy, that pitiless foe which he called ‘cormorant devouring time,’ no wonder that he knew it, and thought it no shame—‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme’—to proclaim it.

Bernard Levin, Enthusiasms