Ben Jonson’s rackety slice of 1614 London life is here given a raucous, coarsely amusing update by Blanche McIntyre. Her coke-snorting hipsters, Russian heiresses, evangelists and muggers sit rather well in Jonson’s freewheeling comedy, where hypocrisy is punctured and wrongdoing largely unpunished.
Despite lots of jokey regional accents and bellowing, her staging stays mostly on the right side of panto, with moments of fine comedy and one chilling interlude.
Jonson was Shakespeare’s rival but his plays can seem both less penetrable and more obvious. The jokes in Bartholomew Fair are blunt, the plot migraine-inducingly complex. Suffice to say several people are out to find fun, wives or profit at the historic fete near Smithfield, and others are determined to stop them.
McIntrye’s production alternately finesses or speeds over the knots in the story. In a peppy ensemble, the standouts are Dickon Tyrell as pompous lawmaker Overdo, Zach Wyatt as rich dupe Cokes, and Joshua Lacey and Boadicea Ricketts playing two couples on opposite sides of the law.
It is the scene in which Ricketts’s pregnant, relatively innocent Win Littlewit and Overdo’s wife are almost suborned into prostitution that sobers the mood. It’s more chilling somehow because their male traducers are played by women.
Otherwise, the gender-blind casting already feels like the new normal here: the surprise is that the Playhouse’s usually candlelit wooden space is covered in shiny mirrors and spotlights.
McIntrye also uses a string trio to break up the frenetic action with gentle songs. The experimental prologue, and the argument against gender-specific casting in theatre, are Jonson’s though. Everything old is new again.
Until Oct 12 (0207 401 9919, shakespearesglobe.com)
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