Timon of Athens

Have been doing an actor training program with the Bell Shakespeare Company in Sydney recently. Since my voice training years I have developed a great interest in Shakespeare, not just from a performance point of view but also from a language point of view. For a lot of people, Shakespeare is about structure and rules and “doing it in a certain way”. However for me it is about finding out the relationship between Elizabethan and modern English so that they are understood in a day-to-day usage context.

At the end of the training, we were allocated scenes to be performed to an audience. I was allocated a scene in the less frequently performed “Timon of Athens”. I was quite glad that I was not just doing some popular scenes from some popular plays. I feel like a challenge and “Timon of Athens” was a timely arrival.

For those who are not particularly familiar with the play, “Timon of Athens” investigates the relationship between money and friends. Timon who was a wealthy man in Athens wasted his wealth on his friends meeting their needs and solving their problems only to find out that once the money was gone so did his “friends”. He was repeatedly warned by one of his acquaintance Apemantus but words were to his deaf ears. The scene I did with my scene partner was about Apemantus seeking Timon out in the wilderness and mocked him for not listening to his warning before. It was a very smart and quick wit verbal tug of war between the two characters. I enjoyed doing it a lot.

When I was reading the play and researching on the play to prepare for the scene, I felt a very strong connection with its theme.  In the scene that I was working on, Apemantus said to Timon:

Your flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft
Hug their deceased perfumes, and have forgot
That ever Timon was

For me Shakespeare’s insight to money and relationship was spot on. Where are those “friends” when you need them most?

Although I was never as wealthy as Timon and was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I was trained by my parents to be caring for others whenever I can. I tried to help out my friends whenever I could if it was possible for me to do so. However, as years passed, I gradually understood that some of these people whom I once thought they were friends, are nothing more than people who came along for a ride in your life. There is an old Chinese saying: “In hard times, see true friends”, which I think carries the same wisdom as Shakespeare did in “Timon of Athens”.

Despite I never expected people to return favours when I extending my helping hand to them, I do admit that when the “Timon moment” arrives, I couldn’t help but felt disappointed. I have never become as cynical as Apemantus was when it comes to friend, but over the years I couldn’t help but getting a bit more and more cautious about who I open myself to and who I could treat as friends.

Nonetheless, when it comes to human relationships, it is still hard to avoid the fact that you could get hurt. When people look so genuine, how could you distinguish the truthful ones from the ones who are just “in for the ride”? How do you deal with situations when people stop answering or replying to your phone calls and emails when they think you are no longer of use to them? How do you handle people who suddenly flock back to you as soon as they saw there are opportunities? Timon, after his experience is determined to destroy these people and wanted to have nothing to do with them. Apemantus wanted to give the world to the beasts and rid of the men if he has the power. That might be possible when you are in ancient Athens or are living in a fantasy world, but reality is still reality, and there is nothing more real than that. We could attempt to cut people off but with modern technology people can reach us by just sending a text message. When these people contact me again would I have an iron heart to delete these people off my life? It is easy to “unfriend” someone on Facebook, but it is a lot harder when you have to deal with this in real life (come on we all know most “friends” on Facebook are not real).

I think generally the world has gotten enough tougher than Timon’s time with the “evolution” of our culture. However, it seems that human nature still hasn’t change much when you can still feel strong connection reading something that was written centuries ago.  After the last few months, I certainly have moved myself towards the Apemantus and Timon’s end on the human relationship scale. But would I end up being as cynical and sceptical as they are, I don’t know.