Wealthy friend to the rich and powerful, patron of the arts, ostentatious host, Timon of Athens showers gifts and hospitality on the city’s elite. He vastly outspends his resources but, finding his coffers empty, reassures his loyal steward that all will be well. When he calls upon his erstwhile associates, instead of offering help, they hang him out to dry. After a final, vengeful banquet, Timon withdraws to a literal and emotional wasteland, living off roots and pouring ever more surreal curses on a morally bankrupt Athens.
NT Live broadcast on 1 November 2012
Reviews
The Evening Standard
Fiona Mountford
“It’s as if Shakespeare recently popped into the National for a script meeting, so fresh-minted does this seem. The lines zing out across the centuries; repeated words such as “lend”, “borrow” and “creditors” could come from an article on the front page of today’s Standard. It’s as bang up-to-the-minute on the financial state we’re in as Enron.”
18/07/2012
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The Stage
Michael Coveney
“Every production of this underrated play I’ve seen (apart from Trevor Nunn’s at the Young Vic with David Suchet) has been sucked into a vacuum. This one is insistently ‘now’ and even the sexual imbalance is righted, with the whores replaced by ballet dancers and Timon’s closest allies, his steward and his servant, played by ‘critical’ women, Deborah Findlay and Olivia Llewellyn. It’s a complete and compelling triumph, with a clear message for all sponsors. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the next NT board meeting.”
18/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Dominic Cavendish
“Hytner and his designer Tim Hatley make sharp, stinging points. We are manifestly in a world of Damien Hirst and his exorbitant art, of braying bankers and their unfeasible bonuses, of empty talk, opportunistic air-kissing, rampant insincerity; all that’s missing is an Olympics logo to ram the topical message home. Yet this thrust is neither gimmicky or glib. Hytner’s invention doesn’t let up when Timon’s credit runs dry and his so-called friends proffer feeble excuses for not coughing up – nor does his insight. This isn’t a gaudy star-vehicle that flatters half-decent material but an evening that stealthily reveals Timon as an invaluable inquiry into human nature and money. You can see why it fascinated Marx, and can speculate as to why it wasn’t performed in its time: it feels as radical as it is despairing.”
18/07/2012
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The Observer
Susannah Clapp
“Suddenly Timon of Athens looks essential. Nicholas Hytner's aggressively witty production, which transforms Athens into a city, the City, of HSBC and helicopters, shows Shakespeare looking into the heart of finance and of debt. Simon Russell Beale makes the central character more coherent than ever before, and more vital, more important, more all-encompassing – part Thersites, part corporation smoothie, part Lear. The evening is a marvel.”
22/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Claudia Pritchard
“What ensues is a tale of trust betrayed that's so vivid we could blush. For Nicholas Hytner has raised Shakespeare's sketchy and tarnished Timon of Athens, chipped off the barnacles, encrusted it with jewels in the shape of lines from other works, and revealed a miraculous, unexpected treasure.”
22/07/2012
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The Daily Express
Julie Carpenter
“When he ends up as Timon the tramp, wheeling rubbish around in a shopping cart, Russell Beale spits bile so effectively that he evokes Timon’s inner demons, almost elevating him to the status of a tragic hero, although not even Russell Beale can hide the fact that Shakespeare seems to have lost his way in the pessimistic second half.”
20/07/2012
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Time Out
Andrzej Lukowski
“Russell Beale portrays him as a man who has traded one fantasy for another, now melodramatically refusing to believe there is anything good left in human society. It's a typically smart, psychological turn from Russell Beale, but his woe-is-me posturing does robs the production of some of its righteous ire.”
18/07/2012
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The Times
Libby Purves
““The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends,” says Apemanthus: Timon is indeed, perhaps clinically, bipolar. But the Lear-like second act can work only if we believe, love and pity both sides of him. And we do. Russell Beale’s trademark is a streak of mischievous energy: controlled, directed sparingly yet integral to his appeal. Even in agony it flares, defiantly illuminating the human need to see a joke within the bitterest despair.”
19/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Ian Shuttleworth
“It remains one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays, almost certainly co-written with Thomas Middleton and quite possibly unfinished and unstaged in his lifetime, but Hytner makes of it a trenchant play for today. Timon time again, one might say.”
18/07/2012
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The Guardian
Michael Billington
“The difficulty lies in the play's second half, where Timon becomes an outcast, railing against the dehumanising impact of money. But, in a manner reminiscent of a recent Cardboard Citizens production, Hytner solves the problem by turning Timon into a denizen of a derelict waste ground. And Russell Beale forges a fine connection between the two halves by suggesting that the later Timon's invective is an extension of his emotional solitude. The one improbability is the discovery of gold beneath the surface of this cardboard city. That aside, there is a burning logic to this production which becomes a fable about the toxic nature of a ruthlessly commercialised world.”
18/07/2012
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The Independent
Paul Taylor
“Hobbling about his hideaway in a half-finished building down the Thames, Beale's Timon hurls out curses like a Lear who has been blocked from feeling pity and yet who seems to know, at some terribly painful level, that part of the problem comes from an emotional inadequacy within himself. That's a mark of the production's excellence. It gives a sharp political context and a piercing look into the personal heart of the matter.”
18/07/2012
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The Daily Mail
Quentin Letts
“Mr Russell Beale, perfect as Timon in his deluded prime, is less suited to playing Timon in embittered poverty. No matter. His raging speech against human nature, which seals the first half, could have been written since the banking crisis. If only the Bank of England had read Timon a decade ago.”
18/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Maxie Szakwinska
“Tends to confirm Einstein’s theory that only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. In this cautionary tale of conspicuous consumption, virtually everyone is on a par with a pile of dog doo, and the playwrights’ disgust, much like a blocked loo, keeps overflowing. A big question hovers over Timon: should any director bother to stage it? Nicholas Hytner gives a text not high in people’s affections a smart, though not clever-clever, contemporary staging that mines the work’s quantities of cynicism and flaring anger about how life is distorted by obeisance to money. In Hytner’s hands it becomes a piece about crony capitalism.”
22/07/2012
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