girl, pen: #MyPlayToday ... Timon of Athens

#MyPlayToday ... Timon of Athens

By Anonymous 15:19

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.