Timon of Athens, starring Simon Russell Beale or Shakespeare on today’s political dynamic

I saw this late Shakespeare play at the Olivier last night (22/10/12). I will leave it to the professionals to review Beale’s performance, safe to say that he was brilliant, but I want to talk about the play.

Surely this is Shakespeare’s least known play, and perhaps deservedly so. The ending is a dramatic failure; the character development is limited at least by the bard’s standards. What is more in the whole play I did not recognise a single quote or aphorism. You know how it is in a normal Shakespeare play – that instant recognition – Oh, that’s where that phrase comes from. But not once did this happen in Timon.

What was striking was the central role of money. Unlike any other of his plays, money is the oil, the black, nasty, sickly sweet blood pumping through the whole play corrupting first the rich, lazy, feckless rich living off Timon’s generosity; then Timon himself as he corrupts the artists living off his wealth and then as he abuses the power that it gives him; then the rich and mean, who refuse to bail him out of debt; then the rabble, who want to foment a revolution but have neither the discipline or the skills to do so, and finally the revolutionary leader, the Stalin as I saw him, who like all the rest sold out to the power that is – money.

The tragedy was set in Athens and played rather poignantly in modern day Athens and for anyone who has been there recently (I was there at Xmas 2010) the rubbish strewn, graffiti blown, wreckage of a great city was all too real. However, the first scenes are in Timon’s luxurious mansion, where he is surrounded by his sycophantic, rich, scrounger friends. He believes himself to be “wealthy in my friends”. They marvel at his honour, his generosity; they thank him for buying their debts, providing their dowries. I felt it to be a Shakespearean commentary on the celebrity culture, but perhaps that is a little anachronistic.

Timon’s descent to the slums is tragic and his acceptance of it and his rejection of humanity, his bitter hatred understandable given the rejection he faces from the beneficiaries of his gifts. The self-righteous, self-serving, posturising of these n’ever-do-wells had me in mind of Wandsworth Tories on a bad day. I particularly liked the woman, who would have paid off all his debts if only he had asked her first rather than leaving her to the end of the queue of requests. I rather felt with Timon. He walked off to his death, though how and by what agency it is not clear.

Meanwhile the beggars, who stole gold from him go off to fight, untold but no doubt to the death after the trio in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, the rich and powerful oligarchy re-establish the control of the state and the leader of the rabble join them, no doubt to become the strong man, the Stalin, of the re-imposed state.

It is a bitter and black tale, in which money plays “the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples” as Karl Marx wrote in an 1844 review. But it is also a play with some relevance to the modern day as we see austerity bringing Athens to its knees, and the British version of austerity imposing massive housing benefit cuts only months after riots in the streets.

I don’t think I had Shakespeare down as such a socialist, even if a rather pessimistic one, until I saw Beale’s riveting performance as Timon of Athens.