Also on stage…

Shakespeare’s Philoctetes Burton Taylor Tuesday 21 – Saturday 25 October The blending of plays from such opposing poles of theatre as Greek tragedy and Elizabethan comedy requires a good deal of confidence and this combination of The Tempest and Sophocles’ Philoctetes may well have found a company fit to do it justice. Elizabeth Belcher has cooked up a melange that brings out new flavours in both. Superficially, the play follows The Tempest’s plot-line and uses Philoctetes’ setting, but this isn’t just Shakespeare in Greek buskins. Caliban has become Philoban (the altered element being Greek for ”love”), and Prospero Titas (“avenger”): the character of Philoctetes has been split between them, so that they act as the two lobes of one brain. Philoban, maimed by a snake-bite and abandoned by his comrades, takes solace in the pity of Titas’ daughter Miranda. Meanwhile, Titas, who has been exiled by his usurping brother Ptolemo, plots revenge, controlling the play’s events with his magic bow. But the division of the Philoctetean psyche is not quite that simple; Titas learns mercy, while Philoban’s suffering is turned to darkness by Miranda’s love for another. By the end of the play, when he crawls onto the stage he is fully capable of inspiring the pity and fear that Aristotle thought the essence of tragedy. The acting is uniformly good, particularly the leads, Raj Gathani and Tom Richards. The production is characterised by attention to detail: the spectrum of lighting used as the scenes progress is a nice touch. If the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, this play deserves every success.ARCHIVE: 1st Week MT2003