Timon of Athens

Published Friday 8 August 2008 at 10:45 by Susan Elkin

Lucy Bailey has reimagined this notoriously tricky piece about money, sycophants, parasites, spongers and personal tragedy by placing sinister, black clad, feathered actors as vultures continually crawling, clicking and occasionally swooping down on bungee wires from a net slung high over the auditorium. The metaphor is obvious but theatrically very effective: as Timon’s generosity sours and turns to bitterness, these hideous creatures are there, immediately, to consume him.

Simon Paisley-Day, as Timon, initially beams and bestows largesse with masses of physical warmth. Later, a rangy Christ-like figure in just an increasing filthy loin cloth, he twitches, growls, threatens through gritted teeth and produces some breath-takingly impassioned soliloquies.

He is well supported by the cynical but, underneath it all, kindly Apemantus, played by Bo Poraj, who squeezes every ounce of humour out of his words. The avuncuarly loyal and long-suffering steward Flavius (Patrick Godfrey) is a good foil too. And Django Bates’ music is so gloriously atmospheric and so beautifully played by a versatile quintet of five women that it deserves to be recorded and listened to in its own right.

It is, however, a play with a lot of words but not all that much innate action and although Bailey deserves full marks for creative ways of making it more visual - with her banquets, drunken excesses and near-circular staging - the pace flags in the second half. The rather laboured and calculatedly revolting excrement joke, for example, is almost pantomimic and got a spontaneous round of applause when two actors finally ran from the stage through the audience with Timon’s shit caked on to their faces but it is, surely, against the grain of what this play is really about.