Timon of Athens
2018: Barry Avrich

This is a modern-dress production from the Canadian Stratford Festival, which usually does a very solid job. I didn’t find it very compelling overall as a dramatic experience, but that’s probably because I don’t very much like the play itself. It’s staged in modern dress and with modern cultural references (the dinner parties have guests in tuxedos, and Alcibiades attacks Athens toward the end with missiles and helicopter gun-ships, and is dressed in green fatigues, like most of the rest of his soldiers). Characters wander around with smart phones. It’s altogether very-up to-date. The transference does not, for my money, either improve or damage this relatively dreary play.

That being said, it’s well staged and well produced, and superbly acted. Timon himself — and it really is his story — is played with almost Lear-like intensity by Joseph Ziegler, but it’s the nature of the play that he has not Lear’s gravitas to push against. The other outstanding figure is Stratford regular Ben Carlson (Feste in Stratford’s Twelfth Night and Petruchio in the most recent of their versions of The Taming of the Shrew) as Apemantus. He’s easily the most likeable character in the piece. He’s the one who does not toady to Timon at the outset, and yet he offers him help later on in spite of that; for his pains he gets pelted with rocks and chased away. It’s not hard to feel sorry for Timon, but it’s really difficult to like him by the time it’s all over.

I suppose that if anyone were able to induce me to like this play, this would be it. So far, I’m waiting for the fascination to arise. Lucian’s version of the story is a lot more entertaining and fun.

Watch Timon of Athens on streaming video from Amazon