The genius of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is that while the obvious target is greed, the characters really want something they cannot hold. They want to change themselves and their surroundings. Base metal into gold. Servant into master. Timid clerk into a being who communes with fairies.
This is comedy with a dark background. The band of rogues who scam Blackfriars residents, claiming to be able to make their dreams come true, have the run of a grand townhouse because the gentry have left the city in fear of plague.
Not all the weird volatility of Jonson’s play is apparent from Polly Findlay’s production. But she has made a glowing evening. Stephen Jeffreys, who provides a savvy new prologue, has cut about 20% of the 1610 text. Unclogged by baffling obscurities, the action whizzes along. The 21st-century scamming parallels leap out the more strikingly for being performed in period. With tweaks. The play opens, beautifully, on designer Helen Goddard’s richly coloured variation of a Dutch still life. Sparkling glass, perishable roses and a skull hint at mortality and the vanity of worldly goods. Dido’s Lament is interrupted by Joplin’s piano rag from The Sting.
The knockout, applauded speech belongs to the strutting voluptuary, Sir Epicure Mammon – although Ian Redford is more martial than marshmallow. The success of the evening depends on the three rogues. All are strong. Mark Lockyer, a sort of hippy player-king, preens powerfully as Subtle, the self-styled alchemist; Ken Nwosu is, rightly, impenetrably smooth as the butler and front man, Face. There is a new star in Siobhán McSweeney. She might easily have mugged up the doxy part (“my smock-rampant”) but often looks slightly askance at the boys’ business. Reactions flit like breezes across her face. She speaks as if driven by meaning, not by self-expression. Her character emerges emphatically but incidentally.
• At the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 6 August, then at the Barbican, London from 2 September to 1 October
