Abstract
The most conspicuous success of Polly Findlay’s production of Ben Jonson’s rare masterpiece was its insistence on the fallacy of appearances. Helen Goddard’s set design presented us with a luscious still-life painting. Luxuriant red drapes upstage and a table, stage-centre, on which were all the usual objects associated with a Mannerist contemplation of life and death: a flickering candle, casually piled books, a glass carafe of deep ruby wine and the obligatory skull. Yet almost as soon as the image registered, Corin Buckeridge’s mischievous score kicked in: a medley of signature tunes deriving from TV shows and films associated with organized crime and confidence tricksters: Mission Impossible, James Bond, The A-Team and perhaps most knowingly, The Sting. This droll juxtaposition set the tone for a riotously jocular production but one which never lost sight of Jonson’s moral seriousness.
The bumpy coalition of Mark Lockyer’s derelict and patched Subtle and Ken Nwosu’s suave and trim Face brilliantly delineated the grinding poverty of the venture tripartite as well as its knowing proficiency. Siobhan McSweeney’s protean Dol served, with ruthless self-interest, to insulate the two of them from each other, as at the argument with which the play opens. As she attempted to mediate between them, they ignored her; she climbed onto a chair behind the railing Face and, without him realizing, offered a knife to his throat.
Findlay’s production insisted on the necessity of audience collaboration. In a well-rehearsed pincer movement, Dapper (Joshua McCord) was got up in a long smock and blindfolded. Face threw himself face down along the edge of the stage and pulled from the feet of a front-row audience member a wiggling mouse to use as a gag. The sequence caused surprise and amusement, but the idea – that the audience was in on the secret – was shrewdly underlined. Likewise, Dapper’s earlier insistence that he is no ‘snerk’ (a substitution for Jonson’s equally impenetrable ‘Chiaus’ [1.2.26]) was met with bewilderment both on and off stage. Following Lovewit’s return and realization that his house had been used as a tricksters’ den, he sought to skewer Face who, jumping down into the audience, took his place in the third row and cowered behind a theatre programme, complicit with and among the spectators.
The play switches gear from the frenetic pace of farce to the pensive awfulness of Mammon’s disgusting self-indulgence. Ian Redford’s corpulent knight piled obscene intemperance upon intemperance: ‘The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels’ heels, / Boil’d i’ the spirit of Sol, and dissolv’d pearl…’ (II.2.75–6). Findlay set off this magniloquence against his physical ineptitude. At one point he lay on his back, rolling from side to side like a stranded tortoise – the mismatch between the excess of his fantasy and his own bodily limitations underlining the ethical punch of Jonson’s dark satire.
Tim Samuels’s Surley was just the right mix of killjoy and self-interest. His scowling presence burst into livid red and yellow for his Spanish disguise. Complete with tall crimson hat and twirling moustache he was as much the production’s comic object as the play’s moral scourge. My only reservation was to do with the Anabaptists. Whether this was to do with their parts being trimmed by Stephen Jeffreys or that they were too flatly caricatured is difficult to be sure, but the tendency of John Cummins’s Ananias to use his rope belt as a cowboy’s lasso brought out a childish stupidity rather than a religious bigotry.
The final sequence emphasized both the deceptiveness of appearances and audience collaboration. As Face – now Jeremy the butler – came to the play’s epilogue, he disrobed to reveal T-shirt and jeans. He drew from his pocket several RSC theatre tickets and totted up the total price of admission for that evening’s audience: ‘you in the stalls, thirty-five to fifty quid?’ and so on…strains of mental arithmetic: ‘carry the one…’. Too tactful to reveal the actual income from a fully sold Swan auditorium, he noted that the audience were as much taken for a ride by the theatrical illusion as the dupes whom the play has so mercilessly parted from their purses. In order to reinforce this, the house-lights rose and the still-life backdrop was lowered to reveal backstage props, lighting and other theatrical paraphernalia. The whole company re-entered in their civvies and, no longer in role, stared blankly at us; beyond the world of the play, they were merely empty vessels.
In paying for the satisfaction of laughing at Dapper, Drugger, Mammon and so on, were we really their moral superiors? In a neat parting shot, the epilogue’s final lines about Face using his money to ‘feast [us] often, and invite new guests’ was surely a double take at the expense (literally) of the RSC’s loyal audiences.