OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that dull, forbidding grey hue that some miserable nutcase chose for the walls. Ominously, hanging centre-stage, is El Greco’s swirly pink vision of Christ ejecting the moneylenders from the temple.
A launch party is in full swing. Champagne flows. A gang of yuppies, toadies, spivs and freeloaders has gathered to toast the opening of the ‘Timon Wing’. Glamorous sycophants hover around the millionaire philanthropist crying, ‘Timon, Timon!’ like hungry seagulls circling a discarded Big Mac. The bounty of Timon knows no bounds. He’s high on charity. Like some crazed love-child of Elton John and Mother Teresa, he spreads goodwill and cash in all directions. Here, he bails out a wrongly imprisoned nobleman. There, he grants a fortune to a handsome pauper besotted with a high-born floozie.
But this excess of sweetness and benevolence can’t last for ever. Sure enough, the fiscal oscillator ticks forward and Timon is plunged from success and affluence into penury and wretchedness. The plutocrat is bankrupt, his land mortgaged, his credit cards cancelled, his piggy-bank empty. Faced with a Himalayan debt crisis, he applies to the muckers and greasers who lapped up his largesse during the boom years. And they, of course, run a mile.
He slides into the underclass. Wearing an anorak stuffed with newspapers, Timon haunts the twilight habitat of the homeless. Here the scene shifts to the pillared concrete underpasses beneath the National Theatre itself.
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