Don't go to an Edward Bond play if you want to be cheered up; Samuel Beckett is a fountain of optimism and good cheer by comparison. Bond was always mentioned in the 1970s as being in the top rank of British dramatists, along with Stoppard and Pinter, but his star has faded and he's now much more performed in Europe than here. He's supposed to be a nightmare to work with, which may be one reason why directors and theatres have shunned his plays, although he certainly hasn't stopped writing them.
This production at the Minerva, the smaller stage of the Chichester Festival Theatre, suggests that Bond's plays are certainly worth rescuing. The main reason the theatre was packed was of course that Patrick Stewart was starring as William Shakespeare. The play's title is still a mystery to me, but the subtitle 'Scenes of Money and Death' gives a pointer. Bond isn't much concerned with orthodox plotting and storytelling, but he has a real ability to construct a dramatic scene on stage. The play opens with a garden scene involving the elderly Shakespeare, who flees his hated family to sit in the chilly open air with the Old Man, a half-witted gardener, well played by John McEnery, a veteran of Shakespeare's Globe. The scene also features a destitute young woman runaway fleeing the draconian laws of Jacobean England, a smooth local landowner (the excellent Jason Watkins) and some other minor characters. The second act features a tavern scene in which an increasingly inebriated Shakespeare listens to a near-monologue by Ben Jonson, a Lear-like scene in the snow and a harrowing deathbed climax in which the dying playwright keeps the door locked against the screams of his hated wife. It's a bleak study of depression and old age, with no hint of comfort or reconciliation. The 'Money' in the play's subtitle refers to Shakespeare's documented role in a land enclosure near Stratford which left poor tenant farmers destitute, and to the wrangles over his will. This is Shakespeare the Warwickshire man of business who emerges from the documentary record, not the gregarious theatrical colleague of Bankside or the romantic figure of Shakespeare in Love.
Patrick Stewart alone is worth the journey to Chichester several times over; only the greatest of actors can dominate the stage while being absolutely still and quiet; John Gielgud had this quality, and so does Simon Russell Beale, but I think Stewart does it best. While Ben Jonson (Richard McCabe) dances around him talking non-stop, Shakespeare is fuddled and almost silent, but Stewart's performance makes him compulsively watchable. The playwright's writing is barely referred to, though there is a bitter comedy in the reproach of his daughter Judith, who shouts at her father: 'You must learn that people have feelings.' Bond seems to be saying that writing skill and emotional empathy on the page count for nothing. 'What are you writing?' Jonson asks him repeatedly. The answer is, nothing.
Director Angus Jackson doesn't let Stewart overshadow the rest of the excellent cast, including Alex Price as the Old Man's puritan son, and Catherine Cusack as Judith. Warwickshire in 1615-1616 is the precise setting for the play, but if you can share Bond's unremittingly bleak view of human existence, it acquires a universal resonance.
I had heard that Bond called the play 'Bingo' because he wanted to see the word up in lights on The Royal Court.
Posted by: Lance Woodman | May 07, 2010 at 11:18 AM