It is odd that it is 34 years since this play was last seen on the main Stratford stage: you would have thought a work that attacks the "cold cash nexus" and shows the hero retreating into Beckettian isolation would be just the ticket for the modern age. And Gregory Doran's fine new production proves that, for all its oddities, Timon is still an eminently playable piece.
The difficulty lies in reconciling its two halves. In the first we see Timon scattering his wealth with reckless abandon and then discovering that neither the Athenian state nor his false friends are prepared to tide him over when his creditors come calling. But this satire on folly and greed turns almost absurdist in the second half, when Timon retreats to the woods and becomes a hermetic misanthrope uttering curses that even Lear might jib at. Attacking sex, money and the entire species, he urges Alcibiades, a banished Athenian captain, to sack the city and "spare not the babe whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy".
Doran holds this difficult play together in several ways, not least by suggesting that it is a moral fable about the court of James I in which conspicuous consumption is combined with a debt-culture and a gaudy, gay sexuality. Timon not only inhabits a world devoid of women, but his dinner parties here have a kitsch, high-camp quality, with a fluttering angel descending from the skies and a drag cabaret provided by a group of male Amazonians.
But, in the end, any production of this curious play stands or falls by its Timon and, with Michael Pennington taking over the lead at short notice, it is in excellent hands. In the first half he behaves like some anointed monarch dispensing largesse; there is also a lordly hypocrisy about the way he winces at some clearly dire portrait before telling the artist "I like your painting". And he rises admirably to the demands of the second half, uttering Timon's monotonously demented curses from the vantage point of a grave, as if seeking a world that finally lies beyond language. It is a stirring performance that makes you yearn one day to see Pennington's Lear.
