Bingo

Synopsis

William Shakespeare is in the last days of his life. Shakespeare is faced with the prospect of losing the land he bought with the money made from his plays. Suddenly he finds himself in the same situation as one of his greatest characters, Lear. Using contemporary documents and what is known of him as a writer and a man, Bond shows that the contradictions of Shakespeare’s life and time are uncannily close to those of our own. He, too, lives in crisis. Big local landowners are enclosing land on a heath outside Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare owns some of it. The landowners intend to drive off the tenants. Then Shakespeare will lose the rents on which he lives. He is old and the inspiration to write has gone so he cannot make his money again. The prospect of poverty terrifies him. The town people want him to help them fight the enclosures. But the landowners offer to protect his income if he refuses to help the town. They present him with a guarantee to sign - and Shakespeare signs. The tenants are driven off the land and reduced to poverty. Riots break out. Houses and barns burn. Beggars are whipped and hanged. And Ben Jonson, seething with jealousy of Shakespeare, arrives with the news that the Globe Theatre has burned down. The uprising intensifies, spreading from town to the countryside. Shakespeare witnesses at first hand the people’s sufferings. He wanders on the heath as Lear had done before him, facing his own guilt. And suddenly the poetry returns, driving him to his last fateful decision.

Our Review:

24 February 2012

I didn’t like much about the movie Anonymous but I did like the idea of Shakespeare, as played by Rafe Spall, crashing about as a chaotically bad actor and patching his plays together in a process of trial, error and maverick deception.

Patrick Stewart offers an equally alarming, though very different, and more soberly expressed, version of the Bard of Avon in Edward Bond’s fine, elliptical 1973 play, which he first acted with the RSC in 1977; the first London embodiment of Bond’s Shakespeare was John Gielgud, who added a lyrical patina Stewart eschews entirely.

Angus Jackson’s production, and this performance, dates from two years ago at the Minerva in Chichester, and Stewart recycles his intriguing and curiously detached presentation of an artist who’s given up work, given up hope and goes quietly into that dark night with the political flow; though not before a sudden fit of rage about bear-baiting (“The Queen ch...

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Latest User Review

Catholic_petdog - 21 March 2012:

Dull, self indulgent and opaque. In the 2nd act, Johnson's remark, that having nothing to say didn't seem to stop some people, earned an ironic titter throughout the audience, which probably woke a few of us up. The other entertainment was the programme, one page of which contains a 'Shakespeare timeline', highlighting key events and literary achievements. The next page, without any apparent sense of irony, contains the 'Edward Bond' timeline. Talk about self promotion!...

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