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Reviews - The Lamentable and True Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham

Shakespeare Bulletin

Reviewed by Mary Bly 

By an Author or Authors Unknown.  Presented by the Metropolitan Playhouse, New York, New York.  April 16-May 15, 2004.  Directed by Alex Roe.  Set by Leigh Henderson.  Costumes by Melissa Estro.  Lighting by Douglas Filomena.  Stage Management by Phillip Bettencourt.  With Tod Mason (Arden), Jason Alan Griffin (Franklin), Teresa Kelsey (Alice), Andrew Firda (Michael), Carter Jackson (Mosby), Jim DiBiasio (Greene), Chris Glenn (Black Will) and others.

             One of Time’s crueler tricks is turning serious concerns from tragic to risible.  Think of those 1950s pictures of seven-year-olds crouched under their little wooden desks, having been assured by teachers that in the event of a nuclear bomb landing on their elementary school, quick action would save every one of them from a tragic death. It’s hard to parse what makes those pictures so funny at this distance, but it’s not only the irony of being protected by a table-top.  It’s also a loss of innocence in the interim: such optimistic precautions against disaster seem naïve in a post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam, post-9/11 world.

 The Lamentable and True Tragedie of Master Arden of Faversham has suffered a similar fate.  Presumably received as a “lamentable” tragedy in the 1590s, its current production at the Metropolitan Playhouse finds it a risible comedy.  Once a performance whose moral resonance extended into every household, it is now limited to the local and silly.  Arden is framed as a moralistic tale, promising to make the hairs of its audience stand on end: men in fear that their wives are dallying behind their backs with servants, and women in despair that one of their sex could act on “insatiable desire,” as the play’s original advertisement notes. 

But something happened between its production in the 1590s and now: the “lamentable” part stole away like a thief in the night.  Although scholars may bemoan the loss of tragic weight in Alex Roe’s production, the truth is that we can’t crouch under the particular wooden desk marked “domestic tragedy” anymore.  The aims of the play, after all, were not just to tell a lively tale but, as prologue puts it, to show “the great malice and dissimulation of a Wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthy lust and the shameful end of all Murderers.  In other words, the play had a grave, if optimistic, precautionary message.  It’s too simple to say that what was tragedy in the 1500s is now merely licentious fodder for the National Enquirer.  The belief that such a tale would act as a deterrent to adultery, let alone murder, is now funny in itself.

            The production opens with a kind of simple wit reflected by the set, an open space of windows and doors easily hopped and peered through. A gentleman sleeps in white satin with gold trim, his rapier elegantly in line with his pointed slippers.  He wears a puffy gold hat, reminiscent of university hats worn by Englishwomen who eschew the mortarboard for a softer look.  Benedictine monks chant a dirge in the background.  One begins to wonder if the gentleman is dead -- when he springs into life.  I’m not sure why we all laughed: something about the denial of our expectations; his overwrought costume; his lugubrious expression. 

            This initial scene might be viewed as a template for the production.  As have likely many readers of this journal, I have dutifully taught Arden of Faversham as a member of that slightly dreary genre, “domestic tragedy.”  Undergraduates do not come to domestic tragedies with great enthusiasm.  Yet Arden is an interesting play, and one’s better students will say alert, sprightly things, thus covering up for others who patently didn’t finish their reading.  If I could make the text spring onto its pointed toes and dance a jig for me, as it did under the direction of Alex Roe, my students would be a great deal happier.  Roe seemed to have cut the text, but not altered it; he gave pride of place to the actors, who turned their parts into comic manifestos.  So John Blaylock, who played the sleeping gentleman, won his laughs without saying a word.

 One reason for all the hilarity is that Roe’s production offers Arden, queered.  As with the dead-yet-quick gentleman who opened Act I, costumes and props play crucial roles in the production.  Tod Mason, as Arden, swishes onto the stage in a little midnight blue velvet miniskirt dress with gold buttons.  He dresses with the prim enthusiasm of a society matron.  His bright canary yellow tights match his buttons, and the little blue bows on his slippers echo his miniskirt.  He repeatedly throws a blue velvet cape over his arm to great effect.  If there was an early modern closet, he’s not very far into it.  What Roe is playing on here, of course, is the homosocial nature of early modern culture.  Franklin calls Arden his “sweet friend,” and Arden sounds like Romeo when he says that Franklin’s “love prolongs my weary life; / And but for thee how odious were this life.”  Franklin, played by Carter Jackson, is a muscled sidekick in lavender stockings who acts a bewildered Watson to Arden’s fluttering Judy Garland. The scene in which the two friends go off to sleep with each other takes advantage of every possible nuance of that situation; awakened from their slumbers, Arden trots onto the stage in a laced pale blue nightgown, clutching a teddy bear; Franklin is bare-chested and annoyed. 

 From my description, it might be difficult to envision how the play sticks to its plot, since Arden was a man whom everyone apparently wanted to kill.  But Mason puts in a truly brilliant performance as Arden; we like him, and we mistrust him.  Mason is the kind of actor who excels in an exhibition of delicate bewilderment.  His legs are pleasingly plump and he uses them to great effect, turning his toes out in dismay, or shaking his round little knees in fear.  How could his wife have strayed from his side to that of a young boy toy?  Yet even as we laugh at his dismay, Mason manages to bring out the uncaring side of the character’s nature.  Arden here is a sort of righteous evangelical:  capable of great brutality, enacted with the solemn and cheerful resolution that he is in the right.

 My only reservation about this production is that sometimes the comedy is too easily achieved, if clever in execution.  The Ardens’ foolish servant, Michael, has an obsession for animal crackers and other childish snacks; while I am fond of animal crackers, I found the fourth or fifth exhibition of his nervous attention to them tiresome.  A better example of the production’s use of creative props occurs with Shakebag.  Black Will and Shakebag are, of course, the “desperate ruffians” hired by Arden’s wife to kill her husband.  In a stroke of creative genius, Shakebag becomes Black Will’s staff, adorned with a skull and liberally smeared with blood.  Black Will, played by Chris Glenn, leaps about the stage, arguing and fighting with his friend, Shakebag.  One of the best scenes in the play is when Black Will and Shakebag get into a fight.  Characteristically, then, the humor here grew from the truly excellent cast of the play, rather than from the script.  A tidy, plump gay man is an enduring comic figure in American culture; a crazed murderer who talks to his “friend,” a painted skull on a stick, suits our national delight in the macabre.  Knock about comedy in which an actor brilliantly battles a stick he himself carries is always popular. 

 In sum, I would rather see Arden queered and squared and turned to knock-about farce, than not see Arden at all.  Roe’s brilliant insights into the laughable side of the tale of a man whom everyone wants to murder, and the Metropolitan Playhouse cast’s witty performances bring this “lamentable and true tragedy” from lame historical text to hilarious life.


OffOffOnline.com 

Reviewed by Nicholas Seeley

It’s just not worth trying to kill some people.

Such is the lesson of The Lamentable and True Tragedie of Master Arden of Faversham in its current state of re-animation at the Metropolitan Playhouse. What Arden lacks in morality it attempts to make up in hilarity, as director Alex Roe plays up the “comical tragedy” of this sixteenth-century true-crime drama.

The story begins with Alice Arden’s decision to dispose of her husband, and reels from one incompetent assassination attempt to another as she enlists nearly the entire town of Faversham in her Italianate schemes. But poison, ambushes, and snipers all fail to dispose of the hapless Master Arden, who, like a sixteenth century Clouseau, manages to blunder through (almost) all unscathed.

As second-string renaissance potboilers go, the text of Arden is really rather good. In the depth of the characters’ inner life can be seen the seeds of later, more sophisticated, criminal dramas like Middleton’s The Changeling, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, and Macbeth. The identity of Arden’s author is long lost, but the vibrant imagery he (or she? Or they?) used is striking enough to have set many scholars wondering whether the play might be an early work of Shakespeare himself.

But it’s easy to see why Roe is aiming for comedy. Based almost blow-for-blow upon the account of the 1551 murder of Master Arden in Holinshed’s 1587 history of England, the play has a Surreal-Life aura to it, and the characters, while short on dramatic grandeur, are as bumbling, shortsighted, and unversed in the subtleties of proper corpse disposal as actual people might be.

However, despite above-average performances and strong production values, this Arden never quite achieves the hilarity it aspires to. Roe’s staging is clear, and the actors play their villainous roles with gusto, but the show doesn't develop the kind of comic sensibility that could make an audience laugh out loud at the play’s hijinks, hijackings and twists of fate into. They’re shooting for Jerry Springer, but only manage to come up with Oprah.

Many of the moments most pregnant with potential are played dissapointingly straight. In one scene, Arden’s servant cowers in fear behind an inopportunely locked door, while outside his erstwhile partner-in-crime shouts threats and implications through the transom as he tries to break in: the audience is primed for a moment of cartoonish hide-and-go-seek that never happens. But some of the bits that are added feel labored, or just plain strange. At one point, a character illustrates another failed murder attempt using... animal crackers?

The overall effect is the feeling that someone ought to turn the volume up a notch. Only Chris Glenn, as the notorious rascal Black Will, and Tod Mason, as Arden himself, come close to getting as far over the edge as the show really could go.

But while the show is never quite riotous it is often amusing, and at its best moments serves up some actual pathos for its array of fairly pathetic bunglers. Jim DiBasio, as the much-wronged Master Greene, and Andrew Firda, as the most would-be of the would-be killers, deserve notice for strong presence and creative use of the language. Teresa Kelsey’s Alice, an aspiring Lady Macbeth who really needs to take her lithium, is right on the ball, though her scenes with her lover Mosby don’t quite crackle the way they could.

Leigh Henderson’s set is also lovely, and provides a great, flexible space for a comedy of locked doors, missed cues, and hidden entrances. It too, sadly, is never quite used to its full potential.

In the end the play is still a tragedy, and nearly everyone ends up hanged or burned alive, which could lead one to question the wisdom of trying to play this grim fable of human stupidity for laughs -- but it’s so tantalizingly close to working.

At the moment, Arden is a strong show, and a definite go-to for any Elizabethan stage enthusiast who wishes to see a rare bit of history. If the cast and director can turn their amps up to eleven, it could be brilliant fun for any audience.



nytheatre.com

Reviewed by Martin Denton - April 16, 2004

verybody wants to murder Arden of Faversham. Okay, not quite everybody: just his wife, Alice; her lover, Mosby; Arden's manservant, Michael, who is promised the hand of Mosby's sister if he does the deed; Greene, whom Arden has swindled out of some land; and Black Will and Shakebag, a pair of ruffians who are employed as hit men by both Greene and Mistress Arden.

And yet, with a stageful of highly motivated characters out to get him, Arden repeatedly fails to die; that's the key to the high-spirited hijinks of Arden of Faversham (or, more formally, The Lamentable and True Tragedie of Master Arden of Faversham), which is being given a rare staging at Metropolitan Playhouse. This play—entirely new to me, though it was written more than four hundred ears ago by "an author or authors unknown"—is delightful: an authentic black farce, the kind of thing Blake Edwards would have written if he had been a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Indeed, the Shakespearean influence is absolutely palpable in Arden, with bawdy bits of wordplay and higher-flown flights of poetic fancy popping up from time to time, as if the playwright felt obligated to stick to formula.

But it's the intricate comic plotting that's of interest here, along with a ticklishly mordant sensibility that feels surprisingly modern for an English Renaissance play. Arden is a thoroughly reprehensible fellow—cowardly, snobbish, avaricious, and possessive—so we never feel too sorry for him. But those who would snuff him out are so nakedly self-possessed in their motives that we don't find much empathy for any of them either. Everybody in the play is so foolishly inept that it's impossible to take any of them seriously. In Arden, we laugh merrily at, not with, a passel of hilariously exaggerated creations.

These folk occasion some splendid comic acting by the eight-person ensemble, most of whom will be familiar to you if you frequent the Metropolitan. Tod Mason is agreeably snotty, snivelly, and childlike as the pompous pain-in-the-butt that is the title character; he's particularly funny doing double- and triple-takes trying to figure out whether his wife, at any given moment, is lying or telling the truth vis-à-vis her rumored affair with Mosby. As said wife, Teresa Kelsey is terrific, an exasperated lioness surrounded by boobs. Carter Jackson is spot-on as her handsome but rather vacant boy toy, Mosby, while Andrew Firda is a riot as the single- and simple-minded Michael, nibbling dopily on animal crackers as events large and trivial overwhelm him. Chris Glenn shines as both Black Will and Shakebag; he has a fight scene with himself that is one of Arden's comic highlights. Playing it straight, more or less, are Jim DiBiasio as Greene and Jason Alan Griffin, exhibiting outsized steadfastness as Franklin, Arden's loyal (and apparently only) supporter. John Blaylock plays all other characters called for in the story, a clever conceit on the part of director Alex Roe.

Roe's work, by the way, is excellent. Without undermining his text or calling undue attention, he has peppered the production with witty, light-hearted anachronisms—those animal crackers, for example, or a stuffed animal clutched tightly in Arden's paws when he is suddenly awakened in the middle of the night. He's abetted by a crackerjack design team—Leigh Henderson on sets, Douglas Filomena on lights, and especially Melissa Estro on costumes, whose work is delicious (check out the bedtime attire she provides for the title character).

So, kudos to Roe and Metropolitan Playhouse for serving up this delectable, little-known romp. Arden of Faversham is a treat, from start to finish.