Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Last night we were supposed to go out to a movie. An old-fashioned date night, before I began a two-week on-call stint.

The plan was to go see a screening of the National Theatre’s 2016 production of Hamlet, but it had been one of those loooong weeks, where I was sure it was Friday but it was only Wednesday, and so on. My wife was just as exhausted, and there was no way she was going to make it through a four-hour play in a darkened room. I might have made it to Act IV, but she would have been snoring before the first body hit the floor.

Not to be completely deterred, we opted instead to stay in and watch a movie at home. No primp-n-prep, no travel, no finding a place to park. Plus, we had better lighting, a shorter duration, and cheaper snacks.

We kept with the Shakespearean theme, and opted to screen a play that we hadn’t before seen staged.

“What?!” you say (complete with interrobang). “There’s a Shakespeare play you haven’t seen?”

Yes.  It’s true, it’s true. Even though I love Shakespeare’s works, I must admit that I haven’t seen every play. Since production companies usually concentrate on the popular titles, there’s a fair number of plays I’ve never seen on stage or film. 

Luckily, I have access to the BBC’s catalog of Shakespearean plays, produced back in the 1980s. The production value is decidedly mediocre, with last-century video quality, somewhat muddy and definitely uneven sound, uninspired costuming, and sets that were both minimal and shabby, but the star power is not to be denied. In every play, younger versions of actors, now giants of British film, tread the boards.

To make it more interesting, and by way of an experiment, we not only selected a play we hadn’t seen, but one of the few I haven’t read. In the past, whenever I was going to see a Shakespeare play that was new to me, I’d bone up on the text before we went. This time, though, I wanted to experience the language fresh, to see if I could follow along without having cribbed the text.

Timon of Athens was the choice. The 1981 production had Jonathan Pryce in the title role. I knew little about the play, other than (a) it was set in Athens, and (b) it was about a man of privilege and wealth who has a rude awakening.

We read the dramatis personae, to familiarize ourselves with the names (that was fair, I thought, as we would have seen that in the programme, had we seen it live), and then hit “play.”

I missed a lot of the dialogue, especially from the minor characters who spoke exceedingly fast and usually over the top of one another as they alternately fawned and whinged while orbiting the variable sun of Timon’s largesse, but once I figured out who was who, I was able to keep up with the action. Likewise, the tirades during Timon’s descent, and the harangues that followed his fall, were comprehensible in the general if not the specific.

Timon of Athens is a dark play, full of cynicism and misanthropy, though for a tragedy it has a very low body count (i.e., one). Timon isn’t a complicated character, for which I was thankful. Had he been as vacillating as Hamlet or as scheming as Iago, I would probably have lost the thread of the action by Act II.

In the end, I felt dissatisfied. I came away knowing what happened and to whom, but as with many Shakespearean plays, the plot is rather simple and straightforward (if not downright silly, in some cases). I d not love Shakespeare for his intricate story lines; I love his words, and taking them in for the first time, by ear alone, I missed too many. I caught a fair bit, of course, but that merely tantalized me, sharpening my appetite for more.

Naturally, Timon is now much higher on my reading list, as are the other plays I have yet to read and see.

Experiments may not produce the results we expect, but then, that’s why they’re experiments.

k