STAGE
Bingo
Young Vic
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Emmerdale meets King Lear as an ageing and bitter Shakespeare ponders divided lands.
REVIEW
There is much meat and merriment, surely, in creating a character out of that hidden myth of a man William Shakespeare.
Such opportunities are passed up by Edward Bond whose 1970s play about the playwright in his Stratford dotage arrives at the Young Vic.
Instead he tells a reductionist story of an old misery guts who has plenty of anguish but very little life.
Bond, a hardline left-winger, was keen to muse wantonly on the theme of the artist in society and his Shakespeare worries and frets, head in hands that he was outside the society that is cruel and unyielding.
Shakespeare signs a deal with land owner William Combe (Matthew Marsh) that sees his own finances secured but those of his peasant neighbours upended.
Among the froth and insurrection that enclosure brings, Shakespeare is a passive figure, rarely roused from his introspection and his repeated question: "Was anything done?"
The charismatic Patrick Stewart makes the most of the meagre pickings as the playwright, railing against inhumanity and his wordless old age but mostly he is a distracted observer of the bothered locals.
He quarrels heartlessly with daughter Judith (Catherine Cusack) and shows only glimpses of the humanity that brimmed in his plays. He casually helps one impoverished young woman but injustices elsewhere make no impact. The quality of his mercy is not trained.
A strong cast - which included excellent performances from Ellie Haddington as an old maid and Tom Godwin as clownish Wally - relish the language, all delivered in an Old English drawl - but the politics is heavy-handed and ponderous.
A show-stealing turn by Richard McCabe as mad cherub Ben Jonson enlivens proceedings for all too brief a time, offering hints of a crowd-pleaser left unwritten but Bond is determined to keep wealth in his crosshairs.
