Theatre review: Bartholomew Fair

The 1980s Canadian sprinter wasn’t the first Ben Jo(h)nson to very obviously be on drugs, as evidenced by the Jacobean playwright’s Bartholomew Fair. Jonson’s comedies tend to be madcap affairs with a lot of grotesque characters getting themselves tied up into convoluted plots and gulled by con-men. Bartholomew Fair’s slice-of-life look at the characters who populate the titular fair features all of this, but without even the suggestion of a coherent plot holding it all together – as Phill put it, if someone asked what happened in the play, you’d have to answer “everything.” But a couple of plotlines do just about start to make sense: Bartholomew Cokes (Zach Wyatt) is due to get married on the feast day of the saint who bears his name and, laden with cash, is spending the day at the celebratory market (in what is now Spitalfields,) keen to stock up on food and luxuries for the wedding day.

Numerous thieves and con-men are out to steal his cash, but two of his friends are also out to steal his fiancée – as Quarlous’ (Jude Owusu) rival is called Winwife (Hedydd Dylan,) there’s not much doubt who’s going to come out victorious, because Jonson was so unafraid of spoilers he regularly used them as character names.

Meanwhile Littlewit (Joshua Lacey) and his wife want to go to the fair, but her Puritanical mother forbids it; his pregnant wife Win’s (Boadicea Ricketts) cravings are a great excuse to go anyway, but Dame Purecraft (Anita Reynolds) insists on coming along to supervise them, along with her personal preacher Zeal-of-the-Land Busy (Jenna Augen.) Also meanwhile, Justice Overdo (Dickon Tyrrell) decides to go undercover at the fair to catch out the crimes he’s sure are being committed while people think he’s not looking, but he chooses to disguise himself as a man he himself has censured in the past, so he ends up getting regular beatings on his own authority. Also also meanwhile, Dame Purecraft’s status as a wealthy widow makes her a much sought-after wife, but she’s been told by a fortune-teller that she must marry a madman, and Trouble-All (Richard Katz,) is so obsessed with following Overdo’s wishes to the letter that everyone thinks him mad, so Purecraft instantly falls in love with him. Sure, why not?

I think it’s very likely the look of Blanche McIntyre’s production is what it’ll be most remembered for. On the one hand there’s Ti Green’s set design, which allows the Swanamaker to be used to its usual strengths as an intimate venue with a lot of entrances and exits for chaos to ensue from, as well as for the actors to get right up in the audience’s faces, sometimes literally; while also giving the place a radical new look that covers up most of the Pit seating, fills the place with mirrors that add to the disorientation, and replaces the familiar candles with electric lights (as this results in “shared lighting” it shouldn’t get Michelle Terry into trouble.) On the other, the small cast taking on dozens of roles means there’s a hell of a lot of different costumes and wigs being used to differentiate them, never mind the voices which give the actors the chance to go right through the lists of accents on their Spotlight pages. The almost supernaturally quick changes are in fact one of the highlights of the evening – at one point Bryony Hannah reappeared on stage as her male character before I even noticed her female one had left it.

The story is frantic and convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility, and McIntyre has approached this by dialling up the insanity enough that she seems to be actively applying for this year’s Pippin Memorial Award for Endearing Whatthefuckery. To what extent this is actually endearing varies; you certainly can’t fault the cast’s energy, or role doubling that seems suspiciously like it’s designed to give Forbes Masson as many absurd cameos as possible (because if you can cast a po-faced Scotsman as a busty fruit-seller complaining about her lovely ripe pears getting knocked around, why wouldn’t you?) But making an already-confusing narrative even more frantic has some obvious drawbacks, while Jonson also lands a modern audience with one of those cases of values dissonance so colossal there’s not much you can do to square it – namely having two women, one of them heavily pregnant, get drugged and forced into prostitution for comic effect. Needless to say McIntyre plays this as a darker scene, but that doesn’t change the fact that the plot basically handwaves the resolution.

If tonight’s attendance is anything to go by, Bartholomew Fair is struggling to find an audience, and while it’s a shame that so many creatives’ efforts are going unrewarded, I can’t really make the case that the end result deserves better (an obscurity in the indoor venue while three well-known Shakespeare comedies are available in the main house is always going to be a hard sell, plus lest we forget the elephant in the room, SWANAMAKER PRICES.) The play’s not much produced any more and a quick look at its Wikipedia page suggests those rare productions tend to be poorly received, so it does seem that Jonson’s particular brand of chaos doesn’t really chime with the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Maybe the day will come it’ll make sense again but while in this incarnation at least it doesn’t really come off, you can’t fault McIntyre and co for trying.

Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson is booking in repertory until the 12th of October at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.