FOR ALL TIME To 14 November.
Keswick/Scarborough.
FOR ALL TIME
by Rick Thomas.
Theatre By The Lake Studio In rep to 7 November 2009.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 1, 22 Oct, 7 Nov 2pm.
Under-26s Free 11 Sept, 2, 23 Oct.
TICKETS: 017687 74411.
www.theatrebythelake.com
Then Stephen Joseph Theatre (The Round) Scarborough To 14 November 2009.
7.30pm 11, 14 Nov Mat 12, 14 Nov2.30pm.
TICKETS: 01723 370541.
www.sjt.uk.com
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 August.
Intimate portrait of Shakespeare looking back in anger.
He was “not of an age but for all time” said opinionated fellow-playwright Ben Jonson of Shakespeare. But he was also a person with particular experiences and anxieties, though he didn’t let them show; even the Sonnets, about the most personal form of writing there is, leave plenty for debate.
Rick Thomas’s new play places Shakespeare just short of fifty, filled with disillusion and grumpily dismissive of his own work. In a problematic start Thomas finds little linguistic flair, while Peter Macqueen can display only a generally grumpy old man.
Shakespeare struggles with co-authorship, alongside fashionable young dramatist John Fletcher, on The Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher briefly suggests Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Christopher Marlowe, supposed dead but living secretly abroad, sending his plays to be nom-de-plume’d by William.
It’s hard to believe any writer could think Shakespeare’s plays came from the deeply different Marlowe, but matters grow more interesting when the real cause of Shakespeare’s disillusion begins to emerge, contrasting plays “for all time” with human decline.
There isn’t the broader perspective of Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo, showing late-life Shakespeare rapaciously buying and enclosing land. But there’s fascination in the ironies Thomas draws out within his hypotheses.
Macqueen’s grizzled bard has understood the world and human nature, but cannot see what lies around him: the new science (a telescope features, with its views of the moon’s landscape – though not the shock this brought to traditional belief), the love of his own Mistress Quickly (Aimée Thomas, a picture of quiet love and ordinary concern) and the possibility of a child to counter impending mortality.
Contrasting this is the smart Fletcher, togged-out in sleek fashions, on a nervy knife-edge at losing his fellow playwright-lover Francis Beaumont. Dennis Herdman finds a well-tuned emotional sympathy for others in the character.
Australian David Allen’s Cheapside (1985) presents young Shakespeare new in London, a whining nonentity among big-ego metropolitan writers, including his first detractor Robert Greene. Maybe someone could team it with Thomas’s portrait of the older playwright about to leave the capital; a repertory of Shakespeare in two – if not all – times.
John: Dennis Herdman.
William: Peter Macqueen.
Margaret: Aimée Thomas.
Director: Stefan Escreet.
Designer: Oliver Townsend.
Arranger/Music Director: Richard Atkinson.
Lighting: Jo Dawson.
Sound: Iain Macrae.
Dialect coach: Charmian Hoare.
Fight director: Kate Waters.
2009-09-03 02:01:52