Ben Jonson’s satire on insatiable greed remains permanently topical. Trevor Nunn’s dazzling new production, aided by Ranjit Bolt’s textual revisions, leaves us in no doubt of the play’s modern resonance by setting it in a world of stock markets, nanotechnology and global warming. At the production’s centre is a stunning performance by Henry Goodman that combines manic exuberance and comic finesse.
Goodman’s Volpone is a sharp-suited plutocrat whose opening hymn to gold is underscored by sacred music: money is clearly his religion. Goodman also suggests that Volpone is an actor who relishes the thrill of performance. He switches within seconds into a dribbling invalid as dupes line up to offer him gifts to become his heir, and at one point transforms himself into a fast-talking, purple-suited mountebank. But Goodman exhibits the dehumanising effect of making gain one’s god: his attempted rape of a gull’s wife involves confining her in iron anklets, and his hubristic shot at one last mercenary coup is achieved only through a snort of coke. You may deplore this Volpone, but you can never take your eyes off him. Orion Lee skilfully plays his sidekick, Mosca, as a devious, deceptively impassive Jeeves.
Nunn also sharply reminds us that Volpone’s victims are themselves predators: Miles Richardson as an omnivorous lawyer and Annette McLaughlin as a voluptuously narcissistic Lady Politic Would-Be, constantly posing for the cameras, are especially effective. Once or twice I questioned the textual updating: the humiliation of Sir Politic Would-Be, the ultimate Englishman abroad, is far funnier in the original where he disguises himself in a tortoiseshell rather than here where he dons a dress. But the production, deftly designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis and using Steven Edis’s music to turn Volpone’s strange retinue into a domestic cabaret, is endlessly ingenious. Just as the Nunn-Goodman combination once gave us a famous Merchant of Venice, it here shows the most beautiful of cities to be a source of vulpine monstrosity.
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At Swan theatre, Stratford-on-Avon until 12 September. Box Office: 0844 800 1110
