There’s a high risk that the Globe’s towers and galleries can bury anything edgy or modern. This makes it especially commendable that director Lucy Bailey and designer William Dudley aim for the sky, roofing the open-air space with black cargo netting from which black-feathered vulture-like aerialists plunge on bungies to torment the hapless Timon and the groundlings.
‘Timon…’, a despairing parable about gold-greed and fair-weather friendship, can, especially if played crudely, come over as a poor man’s ‘Lear’. Timon’s encounters with various hangers-on (who sponge off him in his wealthy days, spurn him when his debts gather, then hotfoot it to his hermit’s cave when they hear he’s found a fresh hoard) can be didactic and repetitive. But Bailey plays the initial banquet give-away scene convincingly as a homosocial scrum full of posh horse-play and rugger-bugger sentimentality.
By the second half, where Timon the hermit is crapping ecstatically and treating his ex-sycophants to shit-smeared carrots, the production has lost its way. Timon’s despair, unlike Lear’s omnipotent rage, takes the play into a very interior place. The vultures above distract from this. And Timon’s more substantial visitors, rebel soldier Alcibiades and cynical philosopher Apemantus pale in comparison. Simon Paisley Day’s Timon has great clarity and pathos, but this staging and space cannot shrink with Timon’s world to the size of a grave.
