The Hampstead Players’ production of The Alchemist
The Hampstead Players had decided to celebrate ‘Shakespeare 400’ with a play not by Shakespeare but by Ben Jonson. ‘Counter-intuitive’, perhaps, would be today’s word for it. But as Stanley Wells says of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, ‘he would not have been what he is without them’. Shakespeare was part of a collaborative golden age of play writing, of which Jonson, his friend and rival, was an important, though very different, member.
Jonson, born and bred a Londoner, had little of Shakespeare’s pastoral romanticism. His classical education gave him a facility in Latin and Greek, allowing him to joke that the provincially-educated Will knew little of the former and still less of the latter. Instead of sharing Shakespeare’s free-ranging attitude to time and place, Jonson observed the classical unities of action, so that the tightly-plotted Alchemist takes place in one house, on one day. And his erudite dialogue is full of classical allusions which the scholar in him could not resist.
But he also had an unscholarly side: he was politically subversive, a roisterer and womaniser, well-known in the London taverns. Twice jailed for sedition and once for killing a man in a duel, he only narrowly avoided the gallows. In The Alchemist, these two sides come together: scholarly classicism meets the London underworld, in an economically plotted, extravagantly written, farcical tale of three knowing con-artists taking over an empty London house in order to prey upon the vanities and fantasies of a gullible public.
This Hampstead Players’ production, directed with flair by Matthew Williams, assisted by Adrian Hughes, was conspicuous for its energy, an energy reinforced by its modern setting. The Rock music, contemporary costumes and streetwise sound effects placed the protagonists firmly in today’s not-so-different world of money-laundering and executive bonuses. The fact that this time we were on the conspirators’ side was due partly to Jonson’s vivid writing and partly to three persuasive performances.
In the energetic role of Face, the servant turned master, Barney Lyons passed himself off to his victims first as a plausible Captain, and then as Ulen Spiegel, a deranged alchemist’s assistant worthy almost of Young Frankenstein. Roderick O’Grady, as Subtle, the ersatz Alchemist, had a strong stage presence and a nice line in ironic humour as he dazzled his victims with obscure alchemical terms. Though the cast list coyly described the third conspirator as ‘their associate’, we note Jonson’s habit of using ‘aptonyms’. Her name, Dol Common, was the clue to her profession. Margaret Pritchard Houston’s argumentative, tarty Dol needed to do a stint as an elegant, seductive lady and even as an exotic Queen of Faery. Always good to watch and hear, she took the honours for verve and versatility.
Into their trap stumbled a succession of self-deluded hopefuls, rather two-dimensional as characters but effectively played: the lubricious Epicure Mammon of Malcolm Stern; Catherine Martin’s cheerfully aspirational gambler Dapper who spent much of the play locked in the privy; Sarah Day’s earnest shop-keeper Drugger; the hypocritical Puritans of Megan Britton and Moragh Gee; and Kastril, Nicholas Holzapfel’s would-be city boy, up from the country with his sister, the attractively rich widow, Dame Pliant, played by Rebecca Selman. Only one, Geoff Prutton’s cynical Pertinax Surly, resisted being taken in, but in the end, despite his attempts to unmask them, in the guise of a preposterous Spanish nobleman, he too was confounded.
The stage was set, simply but tellingly, with the accoutrements of the Alchemist’s trade. The performance area itself was three-sided, much like The Globe where, in 1610, Jonson’s play had first taken place. The players moved continuously around, acting to all sides of the space, not always wholly audible or comprehensible, but always generating energy and filling the stage with movement.
As the conspirators’ plans became more complex, threatening to unravel on them, the choreography became more and more frenetic. The action built up to an effective climax with the return of Simon Malpas as Lovewit, Face’s absent master. The stage became ever fuller at the entry of a crowd of curious neighbours, like the final scene of many a comic opera, in which plotters are unmasked and loose ends tied together. Jonson, however, avoids such a resolution, and while he neatly pairs Lovewit and the rich widow, the final moments of the production brought out clearly the wedge he drives between the fortunate, forgiven Face and his unlucky co-conspirators – though one felt that, like Lionel Bart’s versions of Fagin and Dodger, they would be survivors.
There is a saying, attributed to everyone from Edmund Kean to Groucho Marx, that comedy is more difficult to do than tragedy. And Jonson’s farcical situations certainly demand a sense of comic timing that not all actors can aspire to. He was a prolific playwright, but performances of his work are rarer than those of Shakespeare, and his distinctive, acerbic idiom is less familiar to us. This was a challenging play to do and through it the Hampstead Players, unused to farce (I can think only of their Arsenic and Old Lace), were discovering new territory, greatly enjoying the experience – along with the audience – and laying down a marker for more.
O rare Ben Jonson!
Bill Risebero