#MyPlayToday ... Timon of Athens

Thankfully I haven't since been typecast as the disease-ridden whore... 
(L-R and with respect to my friends who may not wish to be named in full) Imogen (Timandra), Me (Phyrinia), Paul (Alcibiades) and John (Timon). Photo courtesy of Arts York, exact credits unknown. 

First impressions of the draw: General nostalgic, warm glow-ey feeling. Shucks. 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? In it's fractured entirety, no. But...

Nothing says 'Happy Father's Day' like a torrent of betrayal and misanthropy! It is, however, rather more fitting for me to do a play reading on Father's Day - it is my wonderful father via whom I first came to love Shakespeare. Perhaps not even to love his works: having been raised amidst the quotations, it is through my Dad predominantly that I grew knowing the world and my own emotions had a lens more beautiful and eloquent than anything I could struggle to comprehend them through. So, thank you, Dad! 

It's also worth a mention that this my first #MyPlayToday since leaving uni. There's something cruelly ironic in pulling the friendless, family-less Timon from the jar days after leaving my second home and the dear, dear friends who are my second family. So to the fates I raise a huge middle finger.

'Nothing brings me all things'
Tim. 5.1.207

But, to the play and to my day. My cryptic answer regarding whether or not I have previously seen Timon of Athens begs an explanation - I have not seen Timon but it is one of the Shakespeare plays I have acted in. That's right. One production amongst the play's performance track record (an illustrious record that I imagine you could count on one hand) featured yours truly. 

Hopefully talking about the play here will elucidate both why this complex tragedy is so difficult to translate to the stage and also why it holds such a high place in my affections. Let's first address the giant Athenian elephant in the room - Timon is a structural mess. Uniquely amongst Shakespeare's plays, it is thought to be both a (potentially unperformed) collaboration and an unfinished play. This poses the biggest challenge in staging the play and I have a big fat bias coming at the play having been in what was a coherent and very accomplished production (our director, Ruby, was a boss). 

I came to reading today with a major soft spot for Timon personally, but giving this troubled and troubling play a reread has given me a renewed interest in the work critically. Like a meringue that is dropped on the way to the table, Timon may be fractured and tragic but some of the fragments are still very tasty. For example, running through this otherwise messy play like a delicious gooey meringue centre (I'm cracking the wind of this poor analogy) is an image system of proto-capitalism as cannibalism that gives the play, quite literally, a distinct flavour. Consumption - monetary and dietary - threatens the play in a way which barbarically blurs the distinctions between the two. It's as if Timon and his wealth (though the two are crucially indistinguishable) is a rich wine, drunk by his flatterers who wake up to the hangover of their lives and that familiar feeling where you swear you will never touch alcohol again. 

'For mine own part,
I never tasted Timon in my life'

Tim. 3.2.78-9 

In this respect and as was highlighted by the recent National Theatre production, the play touches modern nerves on materialism and the human price of capitalism - topics Shakespeare rarely speaks to us upon. It has biting misanthropy and slagging matches that make Hermia and Helena's spat look tame. But it also has touching, defeated loyalty from Flavius. I truly feel Timon, Apemantus and Flavius are gems for any actor and more than this, gems that break the mould drastically on some Shakespearean stock-types of Patriarch, Fool/Cynic and Servant. 

Timon, who in my head will always have the voice of my wonderful friend John, has not only shades of the nakedness-inclined Lear but also has suicidal leanings reminiscent of Hamlet. The plotline is frankly weird and akin to a fairytale, which makes this play the sister to another Shakespearean oddball which is beginning to undergo theatrical rehabilitation, Cymbeline. But I mustn't argue the merits of this play for its resemblance to others: like its eponymous anti-hero, Timon is something of a difficult loner. It is perhaps too often read as a simplistic manifestation of the 'single tragic flaw' taken to its reductive limits. The play is this but it's also more. A study in recognisable greed and loyalty, a bitter purge of tragic/late play world-weariness (think Prospero's 'my charms are all o'erthrown' speech on steroids), an extenuated feast of human flesh, a moralistic take on the insecurities of loneliness. And, perhaps oddly enough, for me Timon is a catalogue of memories and good friends.  

To close up this blog post on a suitably sickly note in honour of Father's Day, 

'I'll have no father, if you be not he'
AYL. 5.4.117

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: 

Is there a bigger slap in the face of gender-diverse casting than Timon of Athens? I should know - I've been in it. 

#MyPlayToday ... Macbeth

First impressions of the draw: 'Blood. Kilts. Reading in an accent. Let's do this.'

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

I should open with an astonishing fact not even the weird sisters might have prophesied: today was 25 degrees. TWENTY-FIVE. What a beautiful day to contemplate freezing Scottish moors and cold-blooded murder. Macbeth is one of the 'bigger' plays whose GCSE-tenure escaped me (if I remember rightly, we did The Merchant of Venice). I have seen productions professional and amateur; productions live and live-screened, filmed and revamped for the BBC. 

I promise this isn't the effect of post-dissertation and heat infused delirium, but I had never realised how sleepy the play is. Sleep is so alike to death in the imagination of the characters, which makes Lady Macbeth's somnambulistic episode and her subsequent absence from the stage until we hear the news of her death all the more poignant. Is sleep for Lady Macbeth, as she argues it is for the sleeping guards of Duncan's chamber, some transitional period towards death? But sleep is also deprived; as Macbeth professes, sleep is murdered when Duncan is. How does this, too, link the sovereignty of sleep with the comfort of a good monarch? And how, finally, does this work into the essential arse-kiss for James that underlies Macbeth? (Philomena Cunk's words, not mine.)

A moment of contemplation for the beauty that is my 1887 Victoria Shakespeare Tragedies. 

'He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?'

Mac. 4.3. 222-6

A favourite scene (amidst a play, I realised today, that I have grossly undervalued) is when Macduff hears the news of his murdered family. Macduff's grief is reminiscent of Constance's in King John (particularly, above), which made me reflect on the biographical dating of that play based on Constance's spectacular speech in 3.4. 'All my pretty chickens' is a line, oddly enough, I have grown up hearing - it's one of my Dad's favourites. The rupture of genuine, raw and disbelieving grief from Macduff with the play's imposition of a 'masculine' ideal of mourning is the subtlest of dramatic tensions from Shakespeare. Gosh, he isn't half good sometimes. 

'Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, 
The death of each day's life'
Mac. 2.2.37-8

As for my day, nowhere in York could I find a way to incorporate haggis into my day. I did, however, have a tragically insular day reading on my own in the Dean's gardens (Can I use a very tenuous interpretation of Bamber to link my day to Macbeth? It seems I just did). Though the inevitable sunburn I received may have been better suited to Leontes' penchant for baby-burning in The Winter's Tale, my reading setting today was tranquil bliss. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: An unprecedented amount of the play's phrasing I found I could sing along to. I hadn't expected Macbeth to be quite so full of recognisable phrases.  

#MyPlayToday ... Measure for Measure

First impressions of the draw: Was a visual one - I have very vivid memories of the BDSM style set from the one time I have seen Measure in performance. 

Had I read the play before? No

Had I seen the play before? Yes

Vienna's seedy streets housed me for the day (actually, for yesterday on account of the late-finishing York Mystery plays, but more on those later). I had been an intrigued admirer of Measure for Measure from afar; having seen a wonderful production at the Swan which sparked my interest in this slinky, sly play. My fascination in the play was caught not least by the fact that Jodie McNee's Isabella was wearing the exact same shoes I had on (16 year old me felt oh-so metatheatrically complicit). More than this, however, the moral and sexual tensions of the play that were introduced to me by this production were as attractive and they were intimidating. 

Perhaps that's why I had never actually picked up the beast to read. I was not surprised that my favourite scenes of performance, those between Angelo and Isabella, retained that original gunpowder essence which makes them ignite on stage. One of my favourite lines comes from these scenes, not for it's poetic value but for it's dramatic potential and for it's spotlight into a dark corner of gendered power relations, Angelo's spine-chilling:

'Who will believe thee, Isabel?'
MM 2.4.156

Is there a more concise and biting snapshot of the play's moral landscape than that question? The theatre nut in me revels that that one line has the potential to be the pivotal joint of the whole play, where Isabella's moral framework begins to dismantle and Angelo's power grows increasingly heedless. 

A special segment of today's post, largely for my own remembrance, is going to be entitled: 'Times Angelo is Totally Comparable to Shakespeare's Other Male Characters'. It's like a 'Where's Wally' but with dramatic and canonic intertextuality: 

'What's this? What's this? Is this her fault or mine?' 
MM 2.2.163

Angelo adopts some of the frenzied (or should I say 'prenzie') syntax of Leontes' 'Too hot, too hot'. 

'heaven hath my empty words'
MM 2.4.2

Like Claudius in Hamlet, Angelo's efforts at praying sincerely are just not up to scratch. 

'They say this Angelo
was not made by man and woman after this
downright way of creation'

MM 3.2.113-5

Angelo and Coriolanus are chilling together in the super-human section of Shakespeare's characters. 

What did surprise me reading the play was the pretty painful comic scenes. The momentary and stifled effort to make Elbow seem a Dogberry-esque fool, the extenuation of comic material whose tone grows increasingly agitated and sour. Of course, we are used to the tone of comedy turning bitter in Shakespeare; Malvolio being the example which springs to mind. But, in Measure for Measure, the process of that turn from laughter to pity is simply underdeveloped and leaves the comic scenes relishing of neither. I realised when reading today that it's not only the comic 'structure' of Measure for Measure that sits so uncomfortably with the play's anti-comic content, but also it's tangible effort to squeeze some (really rather poor) comic content in there. 

'Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all!
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.'

MM 2.1.37-8

Just as the play tries to shift itself unconvincingly into generic conventions, so too my expectations of the play were challenged and some of the results left me a mixture of fulfilled and disappointed. My reading day happened to be the anecdote - reading in the beautiful Gatehouse Coffee, discussing Shakespeare and poetry with my wonderful friend Noor was a welcome removal from the play's atmosphere of overwhelmingly putrid morality. The play's implicit religious themes and morality ambiguity was also complemented and contrasted by my evening of theatre; watching the epic Mystery Plays in the York Minster. By 'epic', I mean almost four hours which is (albeit happily!) the reason for this delayed post.  

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Is there a more bare-arsed deus ex machina than Ragozine's death? Come on, even the Duke points out that it's an unbelievably fortunate device.