demoncleaner
Posts: 2166
Joined: 3/10/2005
From: Belfast
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quote:
ORIGINAL: elab49
I hope you get the option - the first time the 2nd 'half' screened was a sellout in Glasgow (and probably elsewhere).
My next NT Live will be Timon of Athens - 3rd NT Live with Simon Russell Beale after London Assurance and the brilliant Collaborators. I'd really love some of these to finally make it to DVD.
Dear elab, I come in peace.
And it's only to say that I saw Timon on Thursday night in Belfast. My first NTL live, I had to type it into google to find there was a post-steam for it here on Empire....and wouldn't you know my arch-nemesis is the one talking about Timon  .
You're not, I love you really, and always have.
Yeah, apart from the coughing bastards in our audience (the Stoppard line from Shakespeare in Love: "Once again the consumptives come out to ruin Shakespeare") I thought the play itself was absolutely beezer. I'm now a massive fan of Simon Russell Beale. When we fought elab - you might have spotted my Widmerpool avatar - and I clearly remember elab, in a Doctor Who thread back in the day, you and impqueen were talking about SRB, and I had to ask who this Beale person was. Now I know him as the Beale-ster, the Simon Russell Beagle, the Ian Beale, the John Beale, the Beale-ionnairre! The first time I saw him was in Terrence Davies "The Deep Blue Sea" then by accident "A Dance to the Music of Time"... if I was listing then Dance to the Music of Time would be the best thing I've seen in 2012...and then of course his Falstaff in The Hollow Crown.
But yes, Nicholas Hytner in the interval says the [next half of the play] was the most bizarre thing Shakespeare ever wrote. It was! In the joyously full-blown cynicism of a character seeing the worst in everything. The second half was pure unadulterated misanthropy. Here Nature is a folding-unto-itself-self-supporting-factory of parasites. The Sun robs off the Stars. The Moon robs off the Sun. The Oceans rob off the Moon. The Earth gives harbour to the Oceans. The Earth steals EXCREMENT from it's tenants to live... and grow... and exploit. In Hamlet the moody fucking teenager makes similar reference to the heavens as a collection of vile, untempered vapours. But Hamlet is inflected with doubt and self-debate and a ceratin beauty comes out of that. Here, there's no introspection, no fucking debate! In Timon's eyes; everything is corrupt. There is nothing "natural". Everything that has life; is to be conceived; to be culled, by something bigger and more ignorant than the thing it just ate. And unlike any other Shakespearean protagonist, there is no dialectic...that is to say, there is no doubt...no discussion. This guy is unrepentant. There's no such thing as a mad man's rant in Shakespeare. What we think of as a rant has been scientifically proven as "wisdom at sprint". With Timon, we get destitute wisdom on crack!
But yeah, the Beale-ster made beautiful loquacious speed out of speeches of self-pity and existential fucking aggression,
Case in point; his speech to the thieves who come to rob him (.....I'm paraphrasing the fuck out of this by the way...to give it meaning and shit)
"Go and rob your fellow man. I say he must be your fellow because all men are thieves. And therefore rob all men you see. Rob the next man you see on the thoroughfare, rob him before he robs you, And if he is not a robber, but an innocent, perhaps a beggar, then he he is an innocent, begging to be robbed. Better still. Cut the throat of the next man you see. Rob him of his life, for all life is thievery. Cut the throat of the next man you see, and the next, and the next, and the next one after that. Don't stop until you get to Athens. Don't stop even then. The men, the women, the children, the babes.......Better still... why wait until you get to Athens? Why not be proper thieves and fall out, and rob, and murder each other now?"
Anyway...that was my reductive, paraphrased summation of Timon of Athens.
Now you ain't fucking seen me, Simon Russell Beale, until you've fucking seen me, right? You get me? Cunt!"
< Message edited by demoncleaner -- 3/11/2012 7:07:18 AM >
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