[In the following review, Wall considers Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Timon of Athens, and finds that Michael Pennington's Timon lacked the required “full ferocity” of hate.]

Hazlitt thought that Shakespeare's feeling for his subject was nowhere more intense or in earnest than in Timon of Athens, but the fierce concentration of the play's argument has severely restricted its theatrical life. Shakespeare may have become dissatisfied with his own single-mindedness, leaving the play unfinished, but the power of its best passages ought to ensure more performances than it gets. It hasn't been seen in the main house at Stratford since John Schlesinger's production, with a bleakly misanthropic Paul Scofield, in 1965.

In the face of such strenuous austerity, the new RSC version hedges its bets. The much-advertised addition of some pleasant music by Duke Ellington (not from his Shakespeare suite Such Sweet Thunder, but written for the other Stratford, in Ontario) risks misleading expectations; the audience for Timon isn't there to enjoy itself. The director Gregory Doran introduces comic nudges whenever he can, however, particularly through the friends who fawn on Timon as long as he showers them with gifts, and desert him thereafter. Shakespeare doesn't give them much individuality, but this is made up for here by flimsy Restoration twittering; such predators should surely be more Jonsonian. They form at most a coterie and do not quite suggest the wider society which Timon later vilifies. It demeans Timon to have “friends” so easily seen through; they hardly seem worth his hate. The professional vanity of the Poet and the Painter are also made the subjects of easy mockery—what they reveal about the dependence of art on wealth isn't seriously examined—but again the actors have little subtext to go on. The way the destitute Timon toys with them reminds one of Hamlet's bantering with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but at least the latter pair have (as Tom Stoppard discovered) some latent life of their own.

The characters in this play lack independent selves because they are essentially functions of Timon's situation, and in a weak cast only the reliable John Woodvine as Timon's faithful steward, Rupert Penry-Jones as an Alcibiades who might understudy Coriolanus, and Richard McCabe as Apemantus supply a compensating degree of presence. McCabe's Apemantus is a young philosopher rather than a hardened dog, and his cynicism more an academic career than the result of disillusioning experience. This makes him lightweight, but his dialogue with the self-exiled Timon—the nearest Timon ever comes to a real conversation—is absorbing, though without the Beckettian overtones suggested by Scofield.

Doran's stage effects are understandably designed to fill out the play's lack of human variety. Some are well integrated, such as the dissolve to a powerful image of Timon huddled beneath the huge wall of the Athens that disowns him; others are merely illustrative, like the sun which, told to hide its beams, slides obediently down the cyclorama. In the Masque of Cupid, the flown-in Amazons are disappointingly male and so—in addition to vulgarizing the whole occasion—miss counterpointing the whores who visit Timon with Alcibiades later. In the last scene, we are distracted from Alcibiades' fudged judgment on Athens by his descent from the flies on an iron gantry. Visually, the production is more opportunist than consistent.

As Timon himself, Michael Pennington tries hard to make the character intelligible. In the early scenes, Timon's compulsive generosity indicates dangerous dependency rather than nobility. His speech on the joys of friendship is lachrymose. This element of weakness, carried over into exile, means that Timon's great tirades against ungrateful man are those of a man deeply wounded as well as, if not more than, justifiably indignant. The difficulty is that the hurt, while it explains, also saps the energy of the hate. Pennington misses the full ferocity of Timon's intransigence, though its momentary modification in favour of the loyal steward is affecting. The absoluteness of his misanthropy is shown by its indiscriminateness. The reiterated imperatives—“Matrons, turn incontinent … Bound servants, steal … Maids, to thy master's bed … Son of sixteen, / Pluck the lin'd crutch from the old limping sire; / With it beat out his brains …” and so on—do not, as Pennington launches them, sufficiently accumulate into an indictment from which no one is safe. Such long-spanned speeches require both considerable breath control and local precision; each instance is registered for itself but also part of an irresistible rhetorical surge.

Pennington's speaking doesn't lack virtuosity, but it tends to be short-winded and sectionalized. Timon's dying words—“Nothing brings me all things” and his haunting description of his “everlasting mansion” on the “verge of salt flood”—are given with sensitive resignation, but any suggestion of spiritual discovery, or the transcendence which made Wilson Knight value the play above Shakespeare's other tragedies, is not attempted. This may be wise, and legitimate, but it adds to the sense that this production is too ready to let the audience, and itself, off.