The Guardian - 31.08.2019

• The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019

(^30) National
▼ Jude Owusu plays a gamester and
a leather-skirted punk in Blanche
McIntyre’s take on Bartholomew Fair
PHOTOGRAPH: MARC BRENNER
Theatre review
A merry muddle of
carnivalesque satire
Michael Billington

B

en Jonson ’s 1614

comedy is an

unwieldy beast at the

best of times. But a

carnivalesque satire

that cries out to occupy

the Globe’s main, open-air theatre is

instead done in its intimate, indoor

playhouse. Although the space has

been reconfi gured and electricity

has replaced the usual candles,

Blanche McIntyre ’s production

sheds little light and resembles an

attempt to cram the contents of a

house into a single trunk.

Two things are obvious about

Jonson’s comedy. One is that it

is a palpably Jacobean play that

attempts to convey the riotous

vice of a contemporary London

fair while showing how its middle-

class visitors are either gulled or

humiliated. While putting the play

into modern dress, McIntyre fi nds

no exact equivalent for Jonson’s

original setting: Zeal-of-the-Land

Busy, for instance, is a precise

portrait of a hypocritical Banbury

puritan here improbably turned

into a portly American evangelist.

The other point is that Jonson off ers

a fantastic gallery of eccentrics.

By having 12 actors portray 30

characters, the production involves

frantic doubling up and creates

confusion: typically, Joshua Lacey

is one minute playing a protective

husband and the next a randy

cutpurse mauling the former’s wife.

A few performances transcend

the merry muddle. Dickon Tyrrell

is a model of sobriety as a snooping

and from Jude Owusu as a gamester

and leather-skirted punk. But the

language , with references to vapours

and trillibubs , remains rooted in the

world of Jacobean city comedy for

which this hectic production fails to

fi nd a plausible modern parallel.

U ntil 12 October

Bartholomew Fair

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse,

London

★★☆☆☆

justice of the peace whose idea of

disguise is to don a beret and funny

specs and who, having come to

censure depravity, ends up in the

stocks. Boadicea Ricketts switches

neatly between a proctor’s pregnant

wife and a cheery balladeer. There

is also good work from Richard Katz

as a security guard and a puppeteer

The production’s

frantic doubling

creates confusion

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