In recent years, Patrick Stewart has shone in a number of Shakespearean roles. Now he gets to play Shakespeare, in Edward Bond's examination of the last year of his life. Bingo (1973) should be a powerful, illuminating drama, yet Bond's lugubrious, monotonous writing transforms the potent subject matter into something wearingly reductive.
This Shakespeare is not the master of insight and compassion we might have hoped from his late plays but a brooding, at times peevish fellow at odds with his daughter Judith (Catherine Cusack) and estranged from his wife, whom we never meet.
Returned to Stratford from London, he looks back over his career with doubt. Bond's subtitle - Scenes of Money and Death - shows that not even Shakespeare is great enough to escape his fellow playwright's unflinching gaze, and Bond duly takes him to task for property interests he protected during the enclosure of common land.
Only one scene, when a roistering, Ben Jonson (show-stealing Richard McCabe) arrives to ask for a loan and to enquire what The Winter's Tale was all about, provides an injection of energy. But it sits oddly with everything else in Angus Jackson's sombre production.
Bond's tone and range is limited and there's little Stewart can do with this thankless part, although he does movingly convey Shakespeare's distress at the brutality of a society that relishes hangings and bear baitings.
"I am stupefied by the suffering I see," he says, although he shows no qualms about inflicting anguish on his own family.
Until March 31 (020 7922 2922, youngvic.org)
Bingo
