Timon of Athens (Globe)

The director and designer of this rare revival of one of Shakespeare’s least loved plays, Lucy Bailey and William Dudley, see the piece as a 17th century precursor of Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. So, a huge black netting covers the Globe arena and black-garbed actors hover like vultures waiting for carrion; was that film sub-titled “Carrion Spending”?

For Timon is a moody philanthropist who gives it all away and then finds himself on a friendless dung heap when the money runs out. Talk about the financial squeeze or the credit crunch: this is the ultimate parable of the price of overspending in a world populated by sycophants and flatterers whose friendship is based solely on material benefits. You can see why Karl Marx so enjoyed the speeches about fool’s gold in Act Four.

The physical concept proves a decorative handicap, for the dynamic comes elsewhere, in the efforts of Timon to define himself as a man in the shadow of cruel cynicism peddled by the philosopher Apemantus (Bo Poraj). Timon undergoes a Lear-like journey to self-knowledge that is all the more frustrating because he doesn’t find anything worth celebrating: “Were I like thee,” he tells Apemantus, “I’d throw away myself.”

Simon Paisley Day, who emerged as one of the comedy stars of Trevor Nunn’s National Theatre period, gives a wonderfully bitter, jaundiced performance in a role once gloomily occupied by Paul Scofield, the ultimate self-punisher. Paisley Day is more the spindly misanthrope recently played by Michael Pennington, stripped to a loincloth, devastatingly precise in his articulation, nurturing hate like a hothouse plant and dispensing a final stash of gold smeared in the excretory slime of his own hideaway hovel.

There is a round scoop on the stage that serves as a banquet table, where the fawning guests (including Michael Matus’s glib poet and Michael Jibson’s facile printer) are entertained in a bacchanalian dance and then stunned by the second feast of stones and warm water. These episodes, like the banishment of the soldier Alcibiades (Gary Oliver) and the humane reprieve of a tortured prisoner, are more dramatically effective than all the somehow restricted twittering and bungee-jumping of the cawing crows.

But the play is endlessly fascinating, sounding much more like Thomas Middleton (who probably wrote most of it) than Shakespeare, and the Globe has wittily revived it just when most of us feel that buying an ice-cream, let alone going on holiday, is a bit of a luxury.

-Michael Coveney