Can a play be enjoyable without being particularly good? In the case of Peter Barnes's comedy about David Garrick's disaster-strewn Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford in 1769, the answer is yes. Barnes's play has a ramshackle gaiety but it often feels like a series of revue sketches in search of a unifying theme.
The subject itself is irresistible: the Garrick Jubilee was both a rain-sodden disaster and a landmark in British bardolatry. And the first half is full of anachronistic fun. First Barnes puts himself into the action as a dreaming hack confronting the money-driven Shakespeare. Then the dithering Garrick, undecided whether to accept the Stratford burghers' invitation to stage a Jubilee, is partly persuaded by a ghostly visitation from an RSC directorial triumvirate consisting of Peter Hall, Terry Hands and Trevor Nunn. Their implied message is that associating oneself with Shakespeare's immortality never did anyone any harm.
But after the jokily kaleidoscopic first half, the play gets us to Stratford for the Jubilee itself, where Barnes makes all the obvious points. Stratford itself is a rural backwater. The locals charge outrageous "Jubilee prices". The weather is constantly filthy and, in the course of three days filled with balls and masquerades, the Avon bursts its banks. Barnes even finds time for a debate about Shakespeare's poetic genius and moral squalor between Garrick and a visiting critic who, like all his kind, is deemed "respectable, malicious and utterly irrelevant".
The jokes come thick and fast, but it is hard to find any coherent viewpoint. Barnes seems awestruck by Shakespeare's ability to create characters "who talked themselves alive", but then, sentimentally, goes on to tell us "we are all Shakespeares". And, while recognising that the Jubilee was the start both of the Stratford tourist industry and a world myth, he fails to set it in a wider historical context. As Jonathan Bate has pointed out, both the Jubilee and the publication of Dr Johnson's Shakespeare edition four years earlier were part of an emerging English nationalism sustained by popular Francophobia.
In place of an argument we get a 1769 And All That revue. We laugh along at Gregory Doran's amiable production, with its knowing references to the cabin-scene from A Night at the Opera, and at the performances of Nicholas Woodeson as a Garrick who mixes bardolatry and self-admiration, of Barry Stanton as a scrofulous Dr Johnson and of Mark Hadfield and Wayne Cater as Stratford shepherds and shit-shovellers who gleefully announce they are comic relief. But relief, I kept wondering, from what? Barnes treats the Jubilee less as a significant historical phenomenon than as a vehicle for a series of broad-bottomed theatrical gags.
Until October 13. Box office: 01789 403403.
