[In the following excerpt, Russell applauds Gregory Doran's simple staging of Timon of Athens, singling out Michael Pennington's Timon and Richard McCabe's Apemantus, and noting that the production is as good as one will see for some time to come.]

Greg Doran's production of Timon of Athens was the last to join the “Summer Festival Season’ in the main house. Alan Bates had been announced for the title role but was obliged to withdraw for health reasons (he had missed several performances of Antony and Cleopatra), and Michael Pennington took over at short notice, with only three weeks of rehearsal. Fortuitously, Pennington had let it be known when he gave the annual Shakespeare's Birthday lecture at Stratford that he coveted the part: he was suddenly taken at his word! The staging was grand and simple. Athens in the first part of the play consisted largely of a high double door against a dark backdrop, and the desert of the closing two acts was an open stage with a pit for Timon's digging at the front and a huge golden sun against the bare brick wall at the back. By the end of the short run in Stratford, Michael Pennington had found a variety in the harangues of the play's final movement that—not unnaturally—might at first elude the finest actor. The production made excellent use of the forestage to allow Timon and, as necessary, others an ease of communication with the audience. The Poet (Sam Dastor) was evidently something of a Ben Jonson, wielding a sizable tome (hardly a slim volume “slipped idly from me”) of his Works. He must have been the author of the masque, and he hovered over it in the guise of Cupid while men in golden armor masqueraded as Amazons. (Ventidius apparently propositioned one of them and was later seen following him to his lodgings without success.) In his prosperity Timon, with his particolored robe and tied-back hair, appeared like an aging hippie. Seizing Cupid's bow and arrow, he seemed an apostle of generalized, unthinking benevolence. Costuming and mise-en-scène combined Jacobean, classical Greek, and modern styles, with scenes in a steam room and a gentlemen's club (for Alcibiades's appeal to the senators). The music written by Duke Ellington for a Canadian production of the play helped to promote the sense (in the first part) of a jaded, weary sophistication, ironical at the expense of the hero's idealism. Apemantus (Richard McCabe) was an honored irritant in Timon's world, with his own cushion set for him at the feast—of course he discarded it. He delivered his mockery by means of a handheld microphone, as a satirical cabaret stand-up. Timon's grandiose transformation of himself into a hermit was mocked by Apemantus's arrival with a deckchair, a pair of sunglasses, a straw hat, and a bottle of suntan lotion: he seemed to be implying that Timon's lair was more a tourist resort than a wilderness.

Doran's production and the performances by Pennington and McCabe—particularly their scenes together—were probably as good as the play is likely to get for a while, challenging comparison with its last Stratford outing, at the Other Place in 1980, when Richard Pasco and John Carlisle appeared in a production directed by Ron Daniels. Once again, the grander, more scabrous moments of the script were well delivered, the honesty of the steward Flavius (John Woodvine) was moving, and the false friends proved satisfyingly treacherous. The Alcibiades subplot stubbornly resisted integration, one still felt that Apemantus was underemployed, and the conclusion remained a damp squib. But there was plenty to enjoy in the display of human dinginess. …