Bingo
It is hardly reasonable to expect people of genius also to be people of noble character, yet it is disappointing to be told William Shakespeare was no angel.
After all, as the programme notes for the opening production of the Chichester season succinctly put it, his writing 'dissects both the cruelty and the potential of the human condition'.
Edward Bond's 1974 drama shows Shakespeare in the final years of his life at Stratford-Upon-Avon, allowing personal greed to over-ride the needs of the poor and personal animosity to trample over the feelings of his family.
It is an uncomfortable play and not totally satisfactory when too much of it is shouted in lesser roles.
Yet the performance of Patrick Stewart as the not-so-sweet William in Angus Jackson's production gives the character something of a tragic status of his own.
He is capable of individual acts of compassion but also of ruthlessness, and as he approaches death, he repeatedly questions his own achievements in the despairing words 'Was anything done?'
Stewart's performance has a measured tiredness, sense of old age, irritability and even cruelty, but also flights of fancy in the extended pages where Bond's script becomes rhapsodic. His drunken double-act with Richard McCabe as cynical rival Ben Jonson is nicely under-stated, but perhaps the most moving relationship is that with the character known simply as Old Woman, beautifully played by Ellie Haddington. John McEnery as her husband is no less compelling.
Designer Robert Innes Hopkins skilfully makes the most of the Minerva's ever-surprising spaciousness.
Until May 22.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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