A Shakespearean Haunting for the Hot and Dry Season - On Adapting Timon of Athens

Summer is officially over. According to the D’harawal dalendar on my pinboard, we are transitioning from the hot and dry Gadalung Marool - time of the Burran (Kangaroo) to the cooler and wet Bana’marrai’yung - the time of the Marrai’gang (Quoll).

D’harawal seasons of the year.

I spent my Gadalung Marool returning to a work that has haunted me for a decade: an exploration of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens.” While setting pen to paper with aim to create a new draft currently titled “Uncover Dogs - A Witch Play.”, I found myself contemplating the enduring relevance of Shakespeare longing for a departure from the relentless pursuit of adapting his works for contemporary or future audiences. In revisiting this project, I remeberd my struggle to find a version of the original story that supports the themes, ideas, and images that initially captivated me.

Perhaps,  it is time to acknowledge that Shakespeare's genius lies in his ability to remain—a repository of brilliant fragments from which we can draw inspiration, rather than a framework onto which we insist on grafting our present-day narratives.

Having taken on the task of directing “Timon” twice, I’ve grappled with the inherent messiness of the script, necessitating adaptations for a contemporary rendering that involve rearranging scenes, editing soliloquies, swapping genders, and removing overt misogyny. My first attempt, as a young director in 2013, aimed to breathe life into the play by exploring what I felt to be its core themes—friendship, resilience, existential depression, and self-hatred cum misanthropy.

Timon among friends @ Old 505 Theatre

The titular character's lack of resilience and their antagonist's one-note cynicism resonated with a young person's narrative—navigating profound betrayal for the first time, balancing limited life experience, and concealing self-loathing under a hatred for others. To enhance these themes, I aged the characters down, predominantly casting women, tapping into Timon's self-sacrificing love that strongly resonated with my female contemporaries as we navigated societal expectations. The decay of our protagonist accelerated by the dog-eat-dog mentality that is contemporary hyper-capitalism. I selectively cut themes less interesting to me; some cuts were brilliant, while others potentially altered the play's context entirely. With a decade of experience, I now question whether I truly wanted to undertake Timon of Athens or if what I sought was to extend the discourse laid out by Shakespeare through this text.

Timon slips into Misanthropy

My second foray into "Timon of Athens" was part of a Masters research project. I was required to dig down deep into the dramaturgy of the original work. I examined how the Nobles during Shakespeare’s time would have understood the tragedy at the heart of the piece. How the city (or Timons friends) were the villains of the story and that his destruction ultimately symbolized the atrophy of the ruling class and the rise of merchants. Let me be clear: this play isn't well-written, and even trying to stick to these set of circumstances makes crafting a solid, dramaturgically sound story challenging. I paused and questioned whether I truly wanted to use the perspective of old-world nobles grappling with early capitalism to narrate a tale of how today's hyper-capitalism intensifies current sentiments of disconnection and despondency. But I wasn’t ready to embrace the answer to that question.

Timon 2.0 Uncover Dogs 2018

The second version created in 2018 involved even deeper script edits and a focus on the protagonist's spiral into misanthropy and the dearth of true bonds of friendship. My aim as a director at this point was on cracking open the form. Exploring the relationship with the audience, allowing them to participate in Timon's story, not just witness it. We got further away from the original text, now with a few writing credits under my belt and half a dozen years as a deviser, I wrote new dialogue to fill gaps and provide a contemporary meta context. I drew on personal experience walking in and out of major depression. But when the insanity of my foray into academia was over, I really questioned the necessity of clinging to Shakespeare's words at all. Was it that the ancient text understood something I didn't, or was it my own hesitancy to break free from the colonial authority of the dead white guy?

Timon about to be eaten by a dog

The announcement of another production of "Timon of Athens", to be performed in early 2024 by Sport for Jove, spurred me to reconnect with the work, and create a new draft. What would my decade-long affair with this play reveal on the page now, and how would I feel in meeting the play again via this new production? Could the team time deliver on the dramatic promise I identified so long ago?

I booked a ticket to “I Hate People or Timon of Athens" with the goal of completing a first draft by the time I attended, hoping to reconnect with the original work and evaluate my own adaptation. However, the performance reinforced my growing conviction that Shakespeare's words, while rich in guiding us through timeless human experiences, may no longer be a viable vehicle for understanding the complexities of our present and future. Adapting his works through character amalgamation or gender shifts seems futile when what we truly crave is an exploration of essential humanness, forged in the furnace of unique personalities. I think maybe we just need to extend the conversation not craft new mouthpieces to speak his thoughts.

in rehearsal encourageing audiences to dance with us

Despite the performance's interesting take on some events, it, in my opinion, failed to deliver on a relevant dramatic promise. Its take on the core themes and actions of the play were quite different from mine, so perhaps I am yearning for a non-existent work rather than experiencing the one presented. But in that yearning, I understand that, this text in its essence, cannot be for the now or the future of storytelling.

A young director points!

So as the days move to the cooler and the wetter (thank goodness!) I would like to make the small and polite request to myself to no longer expect Shakespearean adaptations to deliver stories that satisfy my yearning to enter the conversation. It is not a rejection of the Bard's brilliance but an acknowledgment that, to truly engage with the contemporary and future, we must release our grip on the notion of adapting his works and, instead, embark on the creation of new, authentic narratives that speak to our evolving human experiences. I hope to be so lucky that it takes 400 odd years for people to say the same of my work.