The Alchemist by Ben Jonson - new comedy at The Questors
The story has a timeless appeal. A group of confidence tricksters team up and set about the business of parting fools from their money.
The genre has a long and successful history in popular drama, taking in the cinema classic The Sting and the television series Hustle.
Back in 1610, centuries before either medium was invented, the basic plot was honed to perfection by Ben Jonson in The Alchemist.
Our director Steve Fitzpatrick is planning to give the play a more modern setting, probably locating the cons in the 1960s, but still keeping the action in London.
"Its themes of greed, credulity and fraud are universal and timeless, but are probably funnier when set in a more familiar period," he says.
He says the language of the play can be a bit opaque at times, so he is doing some judicious cutting and re-wording to make sure it is accessible to a modern audience.
Ben Jonson is universally regarded as the second greatest dramatist in the English language after Shakespeare, and The Alchemist has always been his most popular play.
According to Coleridge it has one of the three most perfect plots in all literature (if you’re interested, the other two are Sophocles’s Oedipus and Fielding’s Tom Jones), and it is just about the only non-Shakespearian play to have held the stage pretty much continuously from when it was written to the present day.
The "perfect plot" revolves around three confidence tricksters who set up business in an empty house, and proceed to entice a succession of dupes to part with their cash in exchange for entirely imaginary rewards.
A young man-about-town wants to cheat at gambling, a businessman craves commercial success along with a rich wife, and a pair of religious hypocrites need to counterfeit money for the greater glory of their sect.
Then there’s a young tearaway up from the country whose ambition is to marry his sister into the nobility and learn how to fight, and the most hedonistic voluptuary ever to appear on any stage wants – well, just about everything, really.
This rich cocktail of greed, lust, social-climbing and monstrous sensuality is perfect material for the talents of our trio of impostors, who impersonate a bewildering array of different characters, ranging from the alchemist of the title to the Queen of the Fairies, as they expertly tailor each con-trick to the particular foibles of each victim.
Even the sceptic who refuses to be fooled finds his own scepticism used against him. Everything goes according to plan until their timing goes awry, and the dupes start to arrive on each others’ heels, necessitating all the desperate improvisation, lightning costume changes, and perfectly synchronised rushing in and out of doors that is the hallmark of the greatest farce.
In the end, of course, the whole plot blows up (literally) in their faces, and the con-artists are conned in their turn, in a dénouement which cannot be given away here, but thoroughly justifies Coleridge’s estimation of its plot.
Steve Fitzpatrick says he loves directing comedy and farce, and has always wanted to direct The Alchemist.
"I like comedy with a dark edge to it," he says. "So since this is both the greatest farce in the English language and the most vicious satire, it is right up my street."
Bargain Night - 27 January - all tickets just £5.00 (subject to availability)
January 23, 2009
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