Volpone

The Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

5/5

WHEN Ben Jonson’s Volpone exalts in his lust for gold, boasting that his gains are made not from creative energy or enterprise — “I use no trade, no venture … have no mills for iron, oil, corn, or men, to grind ’em into poulder” — but from exploiting the greed of his fellow men, we recognise the driving force behind today’s grotesquely self-rewarded bankers and big-business tycoons. 

More acutely than any of his Jacobean contemporary playwrights, Jonson understood the corrupting nature of early capitalism, where the worship of wealth was already becoming the cancerous worm destroying human values.

While the RSC’s recent modernised treatments of some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries have sat uneasily with plays rooted in their period, director Trevor Nunn’s updating certainly goes for the contemporary jugular in this production. 

Henry Goodman’s Volpone — the wolf — is a tour-de-force. Playing a decayed and dying magnifico he is able, with the aid of his fiendishly inventive sidekick Mosca (Orion Lee), to gull local luminaries into loading him with gifts in the expectation of being his sole beneficiary. 

Then, disguised as an opera-singing snake- oil salesman, Goodman puts on a brilliant cabaret performance to attract the interest of the young wife of one of his victims whose avaricious hopes have him attempting to coerce her, on medical grounds, into the bed of his apparently impotent tormentor.

Inevitably, the Volpone-Mosca duo are destined for self-destruction. So it proves in a hilarious court scene finale where Goodman, channeling a Ronnie Barker-style policeman routine, attempts to further his gleefully sadistic treatment of his victims.

There are splendid characterisations from Miles Richardson, Geoffrey Freshwater and Matthew Kelly as Volpone’s dupes and an engagingly bizarre trio of grotesques — dwarf, hermaphrodite and eunuch — from Jon Key, Ankur Bahl and Julian Hoult.

Nunn handles Jonson’s structural balance between comedy and farce with superb skill but there’s great merit too in Ranjit Bolt’s free revisions of the script. Jonson’s dramatic language is as uniquely distinctive as Shakespeare’s and modern insertions and adaptations can jar on the ear. 

That’s not the case here, where the period and the modern seamlessly meld into a comic triumph with darker undertones — a reminder that Jonson knew that for all the merriment, life is no laughing matter.

Runs until September 12, box office: rsc.org.uk