Pickpocketing a Classic

The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson. It is ironic for the Lincoln Center Theater to be doing this play, since the troupe specializes in turning dramatic gold into lead. Some new actors are present, notably Michael O'Sullivan, a mutilatingly funny man. They help to steal the show from Jonson, but pickpocketing a classic is the meanest form of tribute. Body English is slammed at the playgoer, but he never hears the king's.

The comedy is set in plague-ridden London where a gentleman has fled the city and left his house in the care of his steward, Face (Robert Symonds). False Face teams up with a charlatan of alchemy named Subtle (O'Sullivan) and a trollop, Dol Common (Nancy Marchand). This trio of con artists gull the gullible -- clerks, widows, fortune hunters such as Sir Epicure Mammon (George Voskovec), and hypocritical Puritans. As written by Jonson, the play has the shapely precision of a ballet, wittily danced to the themes of vanity, greed, cunning, lust and fraud. As directed by Jules Irving, it becomes a shapeless clown show.

There is no inkling in this production that Ben Jonson is not simply Shakespeare writ small. Shakespeare is like the sea; he accepts and purifies all things. But Jonson is like the tide: a cool comic moralist who spews upon the shore line all the debris of vice-infected humanity. In The Alchemist and Volpone, Jonson was a giant of comedy. Directing for the crude buffoonery characteristic of the Bard's low-comedy scenes, Irving turns him into a Shakespearean dwarf.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.