PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Crypt, St Pauls Church, Bristol (Tue 1-Sat 5 Nov)

THEATRE It’s a high-risk strategy, launching a brand new company with an up-close-and-personal production of a heavyweight tragedy in an unconventional venue. Mind you, people said much the same about Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory ten years ago. Here, Gentleman Jack Theatre make their debut with ‘Timon of Athens’, Shakespeare’s (probable) collaboration with Thomas Middleton, under the unforgiving strip lights of the vaulted crypt beneath Southville’s St Pauls Church.

Given that the play’s set in Greece, principally concerns the corrosive, corrupting effect of money and ends in a popular uprising, there are plenty of topical resonances, and the pre-show gambit of treating the audience as if we’re guests at some high-falutin’ PR beano (complete with free fizz and Ferrero Rocher), not to mention the odd nod to the summer riots – hoodied figures loot digital tellies and the like from bankrupted Timon’s house – point them up nicely.

Timon, you see, is yer classic more-money-than-sense tycoon: while he flaunts his Bill Gates-scale wealth by throwing lavish parties and handing out expensive gifts to his personal Bullingdon Club, he’s actually racking up unsustainable debts, and he promptly goes into denial when his loyal servant Flavia (Alison Campbell) points out the yawning chasm in his finances. Cue the calling in of debts, his friends’ cynical refusal to help and a very Shakespearean descent into bitterness, misanthropy and life in a cave. When the Athenians ask him to help stop his old chum Alcibiades making mincemeat of them, Timon gives them the ultimate ‘fuck you’ and promptly kills himself.

As a play, perhaps, this isn’t Shakespeare’s finest (Bardophiles, of course, can blame its faults on Middleton), and Gentleman Jack wisely shear off large acres of verbiage and focus on the key events. Even so, their as-advertised 80 minutes turn out to be over 100 and that’s quite a big ask of an audience standing amongst a thicket of pillars while the slightly fidgety action ricochets from one end of the crypt to the other.

Still, if a bit more pruning wouldn’t go amiss, the production certainly has plenty of verve. Some of the performances might occasionally turn a tad patchy lower down the batting order, but Philip Perry’s open-handed but then desperate Timon, Danaan McAleer’s bitterly philosophical Apemantus, Anthony Wright-Wilson’s muscular Alcibiades and Jonathan Charles’s louche Lucullus engage and convince. There are some neat bits of staging too – most notably an unexpected dance routine and Timon’s angry ‘discovery’ of his cave – and if the whole production has a slightly rough-around-the-edges feel, that’s all to the good: a sign that Gentleman Jack might well deliver some very interesting theatre in unusual spaces over the next few years. (Tom Phillips)

Copyright Tom Phillips 2011