Theater Review: The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham at the White Bear in South London

That for several centuries Shakespeare was suggested as the author of The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham is not surprising. As you watch Mobsy, the lover of the dangerous Lady Alice, lament the trap into which he's woven himself — "my golden time was when I kept no gold..." — it is impossible not to think of Lady Macbeth and "out, damned spot".

This early (1592) play is a multi-dimensional, lively effort by a playwright whose identity remains unknown, the Bard having been ruled out by most of the experts. If lacking in the subtle dance of plot, character, and humour of Shakespeare's true works, it is still surprising that this text is not performed more often.

There's a curious modernity in a plot in which we know the ending — the death of Master Arden — but watch the twist and twirls as the deadly adulterous Lady Alice works towards her objective, thwarted by both the fates and in ineptitude of her servants. I'm not spoiling the "authentic" experience here, for every audience-member of 1592 knew the story: the first print version of the script billed it as a "True Tragedie", and the tale of the real-life Master Arden, who was murdered in 1551, was a familiar one, his fate recorded in the then definitive national history, Holinshead's Chronicles.

The White Bear and the Skin and Bone Theatre deserve credit for taking the big step of an August production of a "forgotten classic" - and it deserves to be a success. There's something here of the Agatha Christie — the lively, twisting plot — that should keep summer audiences happily entertained.

The young cast makes a good fist of their work: Zoe Simon as Alice is a taunt-wound spring of passionate desire for the forbidden fruit of Mobsy (Chris New making a fine show of his first professional outing). Simon's fists are permanently half-curled, as if ready to claw and scratch like the wild animal she almost seems. Nicholas Prideaux gives Arden a convincingly careless aristocratic swagger; Franklin (Dominic Tighe) as his considerably smarter, more subtle friend, the only character who can see through Alice, left me thinking this surely was the character that the playwright had considered his own.

The two villains Black Will (Alistair Scott) and Matthew Gammie (ShakeBag) don't always get all of the laughs they might, but manage a nice line in inept, blustering menace. (I thought Gammie's accent was interesting - at moments he almost convinced me he was a 16th-century Thames waterman gone bad.) It is Carl Prekopp as Clarke, the pathetically bespectacled lovelorn artist, who finds the best laughs with a curiously rubbery body language.

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist. …

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