RSC Friends

Photograph by Simon Annand

Timon of Athens deserves to be staged more often because it shares many of our contemporary concerns about excessive wealth and avarice.

Lady Timon indulges her flatterers taste in fine dining and expensive gifts and is delighted by their expressions of pleasure.The dress code favours gold and feathered capes are evidently ‘in’. It is a feast of bling. Music and costume capture the febrile atmosphere but the lavish expenditure ‘cannot hold’ and bankrupted, Timon is cruelly abandoned by her former friends.

The second half of the play sees Timon renounce material things and become a hermit living in the woods. A fortuitous discovery of gold coins attracts thieves and chancers to Timon’s cave but they are overawed and confounded by this ‘lady of the woods’ and her inexplicable transformation.

Meanwhile discontent festers amongst the ‘gilet jaunes’ of Athens as Alcibiades, affected by Timon’s death, tries to broker an uneasy peace.

A dark and complex satire with excellent performances from an ensemble cast.