By John Shand
Last year, one play rattled my bones like no other: Sport for Jove’s production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. My five-star review enthused that it had “a truth, an energy and a ferocity to make the blood drain from your face”, and a “visceral, raw, compelling and moving” performance from Damien Ryan as Timon.
Seldom performed, the play, here retitled I Hate People; Or Timon of Athens, tells of Timon being so profligately generous that he runs himself into bankruptcy, whereupon his “friends” turn on him, so he renounces Athens and retreats to live in the “natural” world in abject poverty.
Margaret Thanos’ stunning production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens is returning to the Seymour Centre. Credit: Steven Siewert
Now this production – the best Shakespeare I’ve seen in Sydney this century – returns.
Director Margaret Thanos connected with Ryan, Sport for Jove’s artistic director, when, having won the 2023 Sandra Bates Director’s Award, she was the assistant director to Ryan on Ensemble Theatre’s Mr Bailey’s Minder. They found many convergences in their thinking, and Thanos mentioned her love of Timon, pitching her vision as “Mount Olympus meets the Greek financial crisis”, with a strong emphasis on ensemble movement. Ryan was hooked.
Despite being the company’s artistic director, he had to audition for the lead role. “That was really important to both of us,” says Thanos, “because I can say undeniably he was the best choice … His audition for this production is one of the best auditions I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing in my life as a director – and I’ve seen hundreds of auditions in the past few years.”
Thanos cast Sport for Jove artistic director Damien Ryan as Timon – but he was strictly concentrating on his own performance in rehearsals. Credit: Steven Siewert
Ryan is also Sydney’s finest and most experienced Shakespeare director, so he and Thanos arrived at an arrangement whereby in rehearsals he focused purely on his role, and only outside that room did he discuss the show’s ideas with his artistic director’s hat on.
“Timon is a story of an extremely wealthy man losing everything,” Thanos explains. “It’s almost a fable in its quality. The imagery of Timon stripping down to wearing nothing but little boxer shorts in that second half is extremely indicative of the destitution that he faces.” Indeed, it is as though Timon’s naked soul is being mirrored in his naked body. “We see,” she continues, “this extravagant imagery at the beginning – the parties, the orgies, the luxury of it all – and then we move into total destitution… It’s inherent in the text that he returns to this so-called natural world to reject mankind, which he perceives as unnatural.”
The on-site rehearsals before the show opened at Leura Everglades in January 2024 were rained out, so opening night was the first proper run.
It was only when Thanos felt the audience reaction that she fully understood something special was happening, even if she already knew Ryan’s performance was extraordinary.
“We pushed to get him to a place where he could do a performance like that,” she says, “and I think it paid off. It’s not an easy role to carry. It’s massive, like Hamlet or something. It takes a genuine psychological toll on you …
“Because of Damien’s and my different perspectives on the character, we’ve actually managed to find quite a three-dimensional, interesting figure inside this role. There’s a moment in the first act where he kisses one of the dancers, and he behaves like a child, and it’s kind of uncanny to watch a man in his 50s behave like that. That’s a really exciting layer that we’ve managed to find in Damien’s performance.
“In the second act, it was about going as deep as we could and really wrenching out the same questions that Hamlet faces: do I live or do I die? Damien said this fantastic thing about Timon wanting to be totally erased. He doesn’t even want to have a grave. He wants the sea to wash over his grave and take it away. He wants no one to remember that he was here.”
The carefully choreographed ensemble had its own impact. “We worked really hard to build that ensemble in a way that they felt very much like a moving organism around Timon,” Thanos says. This was amplified at Leura by the lush, natural world surrounding the players, and a natural transition from day to night occurring between the play’s two halves.
Between that first run of Timon and this new season, Thanos has been the Andrew Cameron Fellow at Belvoir Street, acting as assistant director on two plays upstairs and directing two plays in the downstairs theatre, as well as one at the Old Fitz. Later this year, she directs another major and confronting work for Sport of Jove: Peter Shaffer’s Equus.
I Hate People; Or Timon of Athens: York Theatre, Seymour Centre, June 12-15.