One of Greenwich Theatre’s highlights last year was its collaboration with Stage on Screen resulting in productions of Dr Faustus and The School for Scandal. These plays won national critical claim, transferred to DVD and are, by all accounts, selling well to schools throughout the country. The productions marked a welcome return to producing by our theatre and 2009’s Dr Faustus was unashamedly local, using a set and props that looked as though they’d been borrowed from the Royal Observatory for the purpose. Even the DVD of the production began with a high-speed trip down the Thames taking in local sights before arriving at Greenwich Theatre.
Ben Jonson’s Volpone, which opens this week, is the new joint project and will be joined by Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. To some extent Volpone is a parable for our times, a comic story of greed, covetousness and feathering one’s own nest – the director might have had Canary Wharf in her sights as she travelled to Greenwich. However, the moral of the tale is wider than this and applies to get-rich-quick schemes throughout the ages. For his audience Jonson ironically, and successfully, seeks to mix ‘profit with your pleasure’.
The arcaded walls and tiled floor root the play in Venice, while smoke billows ominously around the theatre. There is a sense of spaciousness, created by designer Neil Irish, that is appropriate to large Venetian piazzas and palazzos. It is a world inhabited by humans who exhibit almost every deadly sin, most notably greed and lechery. Jonson, and the production, successfully unsettle the audience by creating drama in that most awkward area, between high comedy and brutal violence. Often the play is hilarious, but that only highlights the brutality of deception and rape.
The play’s success can be measured by the comic relationship between the double act at the centre of the action. In this production we find an almost perfect pairing, Richard Bremmer’s spidery Volpone disgusts and amuses in equal measure and is served brilliantly by Mark Hadfield’s energetic and crumpled fixer, Mosca (aka the parasite). Amongst the excellent cast I would highlight James Wallace’s creation of a hugely endearing character, Sir Politic Would-be. His sunburnt features and panda eyes parody perfectly the Englishman abroad. His character seems to pay homage to the late Iain Carmichael as the audience’s sympathy is aroused by his truly pathetic attempts to be an entrepreneur.
Director Elizabeth Freestone has created a hugely imaginative world in which she can slow time down, speed it up and rewind it in order to manipulate the characters for the audience’s greater enjoyment, the action after the interval being a particular treat. The costumes are wonderfully absurd creations, touched with slightly cartoon-like features, for instance stiff curled tailcoats and absurd feathers. The only element which worried me was the role of Volpone’s colourful array of companions, including a rather tall dwarf, and an unmusical castrate. Although these are Jonson’s comic clowns, in this production, they were less funny and more uncertain than one might expect.
The introduction in the programme suggests that an aim is to ‘restore Greenwich Theatre to its position as one of London’s significant producing theatres’. On this evidence it has returned and now needs to consolidate its success – perhaps with Volpone’s sister production The Duchess of Malfi?
Volpone at Greenwich Theatre running until April 10th