SOURCE: Wall, Stephen. “Teary, Bleary and World-Weary.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5031 (3 September 1999): 19.

In the following review, Wall considers Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Timon of Athens, and finds that Michael Pennington's Timon lacked the required “full ferocity” of hate.

Hazlitt thought that Shakespeare's feeling for his subject was nowhere more intense or in earnest than in Timon of Athens, but the fierce concentration of the play's argument has severely restricted its theatrical life. Shakespeare may have become dissatisfied with his own single-mindedness, leaving the play unfinished, but the power of its best passages ought to ensure more performances than it gets. It hasn't been seen in the main house at Stratford since John Schlesinger's production, with a bleakly misanthropic Paul Scofield, in 1965.

In the face of such strenuous austerity, the new RSC version hedges its bets. The much-advertised addition of some pleasant music by Duke Ellington...