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Arden Of Faversham
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
3/5
THE young wife of a ruthless business man falls passionately for a local go-getter and decides to bump off her husband. To do the job she and her lover hire a couple of hitmen who after several frustrated attempts succeed. They all meet a messy end.
According to the original title page of Arden Of Faversham this is a tale of “unsatiable desire and filthy lust.”
If this sounds like standard TV fare, it is in fact an Elizabethan domestic tragedy based on reported events.
Polly Findlay’s production is the second in the RSC’s season of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries featuring “powerfully fascinating women.” Like the opening The Roaring Girl, this anonymous work is given a modern dress treatment designed presumably to draw modern parallels.
The problem is how a contemporary audience can be entertained, given the simplicity and thinness of the plot.
The answer here is to ditch the tragedy and concentrate on elements — certainly there in the play — of black farce. What we have could be entitled Carry On Killing or more maybe even Carry On Cocking-Up.
Arden lords it over his factory workforce who are busy marketing quaint little gilt cats with beckoning paws while he fulminates and agonises at the obvious affair his skittishly manipulative wife Alice is conducting with the spivish layabout, Mosby.
His lower-class origins are clear when he removes his chewing gum before French kissing her.
The comic focus of this production inevitably centres on the unfortunate and incompetent duo of would-be assassins — the ratty Black Will (Jay Simpson) and his gorilla sidekick Shakebag (Tony Jayawardene) — and the suspicion is that the play’s anonymous author may have been having a go at a more successful rival.
The cast give their all and sensibly the production skips along in this shortened 100-minute version. If, unlike Ian Redford’s Arden, Sharon Small’s Alice conveys little of the emotional tensions carried by the language, she makes up for this with a gaily adolescent delight in her amorously murderous games.
There’s no need for her epilogue request that we “pardon this naked tragedy” because it’s noticeable by its absence.
Runs until October 2. Box office: 08448-001114.
