Volpone
Brockley Jack Theatre
01/10/15
3 Stars
‘Riches are in fortune a greater good than wisdom is in nature’ – Volpone
Some years ago I went to a classical music masterclass devoted not to notes but to rests. It focused entirely on where singers should and should not breathe in elaborate Baroque arias frothing with fearsome coloratura. At one point where Bach or Handel had written a passage without any obvious breaks for breath, various options were tried and the audience voted on them. It was clear to all of us once we had heard it where the natural break and phrasing lay. There was a right answer, but you had to find it for yourself, it was not a given.
I thought of this episode again at the press night of this worthy but flawed production of Volpone at the Brockley Jack. Jonson’s play of 1605 is full of highly-wrought soliloquies and speeches that fizz with showy Latinate vocabulary and elaborate paradoxes. Negotiating them at all requires skill, and to do so with the required smooth panache involves above all a precise ear for breathing, pace and rhetorical projection. Nothing less will do.
Once you get below the glittering, treacherous surfaces of the blank verse it is much plainer sailing. Jonson’s tale is of Volpone – a rich Venetian hypochondriac – and his insinuating parasite – Mosca, the fly – who both lure fortune hunters into thinking they might inherit the crafty fox’s fortune. This is a stereotypical moral fable in the manner of Aesop where instead of nuanced individual characters you have bundles of characteristics – Corbaccio, the raven, Voltore, the vulture, Corvino, the crow – that play out in a more or less predictable matrix. The playing style therefore needs to be comic, knowing, fast and furious; revelling in the feast of rhetorical possibilities while maintaining an ironic distance from them – Blackadder would be a reasonable modern parallel.
However, it is not simply a parable about avarice and its pitfalls. Jonson’s deeper purpose is to ask whether possession of riches is more of an advantage in the long run than natural wisdom – a more troubling question to pose, especially when coupled to Mosca’s claim that we are all of us in some ways parasites in our social dealings, however much we may kid ourselves along the way.
The play was first produced at the Globe and was continuously popular until the Victorians lost their sense of irony. In recent years it has made a roaring return not least thanks to the National Theatre production of 1974 which had a dream cast of Paul Scofield and Ben Kingsley in the leads, and the luxury casting of John Gielgud and Ian Charleson in minor roles.
Volpone needs to dominate and lead the action in setting up the intrigues in first half and Mosca takes over the baton in the second. Both need to be individual actors of real skill and flair but also a great collaborative team. If one is off his game the whole cannot succeed. In the case of the recent RSC production reviewed by Stephen Collins it was the Mosca that was deficient, and here, unfortunately, it is the Volpone. On the press night Steve Hope-Wynne was not fully on top of the text, whether in content and shaping, and in this repertory there is simply nowhere to hide. One hopes that these problems are ironed out in the course of the run, and so much of it comes down, as I said at the start, to matters of breathing and structure, just as in preparing operatic repertory.
In contrast this production’s Mosca was outstanding. In the delivery of monologues and in the rapid-fire interchanges he has to stage-manage Pip Brignall did full justice to the superlative materials Jonson gives him. This is wonderfully slippery impersonation, with nicely diversified forms of flattery for each of the potential dupes and an oily, slithering range of stage movement entirely in keeping with the character. The second half of the action had a debonair flow to it as a result that was genuinely impressive and compelling.
The avaricious suitors are stock types, with no conventionally ‘good’ characters in sight – even Bonario and Celia, both innocent victims of the plotting, are very lightly sketched in by Jonson and don’t hold our emotional attention. There was good work by a range of actors in these caricature parts with the pick of them being Rupert Bates, with a neat lawyerly bait-and-switch routine as advocate Voltore.
Jonson puts more effort into the sub-plot involving goofy English traveller Sir Politick Would-Be, played here by Edward Fisher as a delightful Mr Pooter type, blithely detached from reality, with an equal mixture of self-doubt and posturing. His wife, Lady Would-Be, is an equally pleasing comic creation, full of nonsensical pretentious blather, and depicted by Ava Amande as Vivien Westwood-type unaware of the consternation she evokes among those around her. I’ve seen productions elsewhere where this sub-plot weighs the play down in the second half, but here their interventions and interludes were delightful portraits of the travails of the ‘English Abroad’.
Director Cecilia Dorland, on behalf of company Scena Mundi, has given the play a 1920s feel in costume, design and music. I didn’t feel that this setting gave any particular insights, but certainly it provides the basis for some roistering devil- may-care musical numbers including a farewell conga that tied the evening up neatly. Scenery was minimal, but given the constraints of space that is inevitable. There were some cuts to the text but not in any way that damaged the integrity of the whole.
At the end Jonson ensures that everyone gets their just deserts – ‘Mischiefs feed like beasts till they be fat and then they bleed.’ However, he also makes it clear this is often a world away from justice itself, and this is nicely symbolised by the presiding judge (Anna Buckland) who is ostentatiously swigging Veuve Clicquot throughout the proceedings.
There were many pleasant and imaginative aspects to this evening, but just as with Restoration Comedy there are certain stylistic and formal requirements for success that are non-negotiable. Everyone involved in this production acted with commitment and a good sense of pace and projection within this intimate space, but the success of the whole remains fundamentally dependent on mastery of a refractory text that like Volpone’s gold, flatters to deceive, unless the actor is very careful.
Volpone runs at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre until 17 October 2015
