Shakespeare Bulletin

Despite its historical lack of popularity in theatres, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton's Timon of Athens has enjoyed several successful productions in the past few decades, often because performances have evoked a particular time period in order to illustrate how close to home this tragedy really is. A story about a rich man who loses everything and then is deserted by his friends might have an allegorical ring, but it also seems all too familiar to us. Productions set during the stock market crash of 1929, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the bursting of the dot.com bubble in the 1990s have resonated strongly with audiences, proving that the symbolic nature of Timon can give us a lens through which we can look at the follies of our own society. Given the troubled economic climate in Britain and the US, many reviewers were expecting Lucy Bailey, the director of the Globe production of Timon in 2008, to set this production in contemporary times. But Bailey and designer William Dudley eschewed the temptation to suggest a particular time period: the costumes were vaguely late-medieval, and no other historical allusions were present. Instead, their design was similar to that of their successful 2006 production of Titus Andronicus, which featured a translucent "roof " over the Globe theatre that evoked the Roman velarium. For Timon a huge net was stretched across the theatre space-a design that aimed to give the audience the feeling of being in an aviary. Actors wearing jagged black capes suggestive of bird wings crawled on the net and perched as they looked at the action below; intermittently they dropped through holes in the netting to swoop down over the spectators' heads, or dangled threateningly over Timon, sometimes speaking the lines of the flattering friends who surround him in the first half of the play.

In the Program Notes, Bailey and Dudley say that they began with the idea that Timon could be seen as "a 17th-century precursor of Hitchcock's film The Birds! The people around Timon are like birds of prey preparing to pounce on any creature that appears weak. Like the terrifying birds in the film, they coldly watch and wait to attack." Building not just upon [End Page 344] Hitchcock but also upon the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, and Cranach, the design of this production used striking animal imagery to depict the full horror of Timon's situation. The play text is rife with references to animals-not just birds, but frequently dogs, as well as a full menagerie that culminates in the cynic Apemantus's comment in act four that "The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts." Because of the linguistic association between cynics and dogs, Apemantus is often called a dog in the play; in this production the flatterers at the banquet "barked" obediently in response to Apemantus's words, as if to suggest that this was a regular game they played in order to amuse Timon. The flatterers also occasionally "clucked" like chickens and enjoyed general rough-housing, as the first banquet degenerated into a food-fight and a friendly "dog pile" on top of Timon. These festivities resembled a sort of Animal House fraternity, highlighting the bestial imagery of the play as well as the homosocial community in which Timon lives. Day's Timon turned these animal jokes against his flatterers later in the play. During the banquet scene in act three, the flatterers were ridiculous, clucking like hungry chickens as they waited for Timon to return to his former generous self, slow to realize that they were being exposed and ridiculed. A growing emphasis on more sinister animals (most insistently the vultures overhead) prepared us for the sharply dark turn of the second half of the play...