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In search
of elusive
gold
Dapper (Sarah Jane-Lee) and shopkeeper Drugger (Alan Francis) . Picture: Robert Day The
Alchemist Coventry
Belgrade B2 ****
PAUL Burbridge’s new production of Ben
Jonson’s most admired – and, in its amiable Jacobean way, notorious –
play The Alchemist
is just the latest in the flood of classic productions Hamish Glen has
directed or coproduced with his Belgrade Theatre company.
Jonson’s off-stage career was almost as frenetic as Christopher
Marlowe’s, though lacked the same grisly ending. Instead, he continued
after The Alchemist
(1610), which starred Richard Burbage, then in his early 40s, as the
wily Subtle, via the almost as successful
The Devil is an Ass (1616) to produce
further plays and the courtly Masques for which he was equally
celebrated, intermittently, into the 1630s; buoyed up by an annuity from
James I which made him effectively the first Poet Laureate (a Master of
the King’s Musick followed under Charles I). In Elizabeth I’s last year Jonson was charged with murder, imprisoned and nearly lost his life; a collaborative play, Eastward Hoe, nearly led to his disfigurement (a Tudor-Jacobean speciality) for insulting the Scots, an offence then verging on blasphemy. But if Shakespeare’s plays –
The Alchemist coincided
Subtle, or, in this case, not, (Tom Peters), Doll Common (Zannah Hodson) and Face (Andrew Harrison) The universality Jonson looks at is the universality of overweening temptation and error. The Alchemist sits alongside Hogarth and Rowlandson – in our own day, Gerald Scarfe - and in literature John Aubrey, among the works of the great caricaturists. Burbridge’s energetic cast, offset by the glaring scarlets of Sean Cavanagh’s set and seating, is an able one. Ten main characters feature: three are crooks, six are gullibles and one (Sir Pertinax Surly, the pleasingly characterful Barrett Robertson, home-grown at the Belgrade) is as it were the viewer, perhaps the chastened audience, looking in distrustfully and seeing chicanery for what it is. Tom Peters, a National Theatre
player not least, heads the monstrous racket – metal-dabblers who can
supposedly conjure up gold (and silver), but with an eye to every kind
of money-grabbing wheeze that springs to mind. The production starts
with violence – a domestic row, effectively – and takes some time to
calm down and ease the pace. Not all the script gets across, though much
of it is as obtuse and arcane as anything in Jonson’s output (Bartholomew
Fair and The Silent Woman are arguably easier fare).
Ever-zestful in his chosen cozening trade, Peters dons crazy,
dressing-up box outfits to perform his various bits of sly buffoonery
(comedy is much to the fore; the satire follows). His aide-de-camp (literally at the end, as servant Jeremy) is Andrew Harrison, who turns Face into a mirthful revue of sleek disguises – sea captain, strange Jewish-tinged necromancer, bustling factotum, arm-twisting heavy – offsetting his own breezy, rumbustious cockney self. It’s a reading that is never less than assured, and invariably commands the stage. Zannah Hodson abets as Doll Common, living up to her name, with a nasty side, open all hours and never averse to a bit of nooky. The ludicrous victims come one
by one to the plonk of an imperious two-tone doorbell. Dapper, the legal
eagle with a gambling lust, and the innocent, blissfully stupid Lady
Pliant, who will end up
I didn’t enjoy all of this.
Shifting the location to Coventry by slipping in a few feeble locational
witticisms (they got laughs; surely hollow ones) struck me as a
pointless patronising of the audience. If you’re going to do that,
better research this historic city’s deeper recesses than slapping in
tee-hees about Berkswell and Daventry, Godiva, Hillfields and Pool
Meadow. Sometimes I didn’t enjoy the
pace, perhaps partly dictated by sheer length (2 hours 47m). The
language is as oblique in places as Lear’s Fool. Too much was rushed
early on; a Nicholas Hytner or Simon McBurney would have allowed this
play to breathe. And that was where the soliloquies scored – for Face,
Doll, even Sir Epicure Mammon. They all shone out. But what I did enjoy was Alan
Francis, credited as a ‘Scottish actor and comedian’ – and my, was he –
in the double role of Abel Drugger – a hapless small shopkeeper and
honest good soul but with aspirations above his station – and Ananias, a
hot-headed proto-Anabaptist, one of the wider ‘whole company of the
separation’ that hived off with the Reformation. This latter is a character
beautifully drawn, both by Jonson and in Burbridge’s modified version,
and for him (as a well-rehearsed enemy of the theatre, equivocating
between ‘coining’ and ‘casting’ where Scripture can be twisted into
mammon) is reserved the bitterest venom of all. The caricature is
masterly, and Francis, with staring eyes as electrifying as Robert
Newton or Hugh Griffith, is a joy to behold. He is also, with
Robertson’s Surly (especially in mock-Spanish) the most lucid speaker of
all.
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with the run of the bard’s great last
dramas - address universal themes of loss, betrayal, jealousy,
power-craze, ruthlessness, pride, ambition, Jonson prefers to look at
the ubiquity of corruption and social presumption in the cities of his
day – not unrelated issues, but more temporal.
unexpectedly well-off, are played by
Sarah-Jane-Lee, the first eagerly bizarre, the latter wanly puzzled but
easily mesmerised – quite fun. Old Vic and Guildhall product Kolade
Agboke all but loses his trousers late on, in a comic amorous mixup
preferable to his bombastice first scene. John Holden-White plays the
rural simpleton Kastril, as vulnerable to the capital’s dazzle as his
suburban equals.