Top (from left to right) : Zak Asgard (Year 10) as Mosca, Ubaid Mussa (Year 10) as Castrone, Tom Crossley (Year 10) as Volpone, and Joey Fleming (Year 10) as Voltore. Bottom (from left to right) : Emyr Williams (Year 10) and Mitchell Simmonds (Year 10) as Lady Politic-Would-Be.
Volpone Founder’s Day 2014
Mr Harry Drew
T he eponymous fox of Jonson’s 1606 masterpiece opens his play by greeting first the day and then his gold, which is then revealed to the audience by his sidekick, the parasite Mosca. Though Jonson then produces for his audience a mordant satire on greed and lust, perhaps we at Dulwich should join with Volpone in enjoying the discovery of treasures, as those of us fortunate enough to have been present in the Upper-Sixth common room during last year’s Founder’s Day were certainly treated to a glimpse of the teeming riches of Dulwich’s dramatic world. Following on from their success in first the Masters’ Library with Fiddle and Squeeze , and then last year’s 50-Minute Faustus performed in Ned’s Cafe, directors Alastair Trevill and Jo Akrill have once again opened up a new area of the College as a theatrical space. Operating this year as Shoestring Productions, these co-conspirators offered us A Very Short Volpone, a tightly edited (and, indeed, altered) rendition of Jonson’s play, performed by a fantastically talented and energetic cast of Year 9 actors. The pop-up theatre they created allowed the audience to be swept along in the complex machinations of Jonson’s plot, capturing the urban vigour of Renaissance Venice, while making the play seem modern and accessible. In this the directors deserve much praise, as the language of the play is dense in places to the point of obscurity, and the plot at times seems to be an attempt to retread all of Plautus in a mere five acts. Credit too must be given to the boys who delivered these difficult lines with such élan; in particular Zak Asgard shone as Mosca, a part that modern productions often seek to reduce in scope. However, here his role as master of ceremonies drove the action forward at breakneck pace; the surprise expressed by Tom Crossley’s Volpone when his seemingly faithful assistant turned into his tormentor-in-chief truly revealed the cruelty and greed that causes the ‘mortifying of the fox’. While these two provided the heart of the play, the wild joie de vivre of Volpone’s household was perhaps best captured by Nano and Castrone, played by Chyaro Hylton and Ubaid Mussa respectively. While Chyaro might have been briefly resting his voice from Chapel choir, he brought his musical talents to the play’s songs, leading a riotous rewrite of kitsch anthem ‘Mr Saxobeat’ and then channelling his inner Howling
Wolf for the ‘Fat in My Blood Blues’ – surely not even the trickiest of Jonson’s lines compare with a song that rhymes ‘hyperlipidemia’ with ‘hypercholesterolemia’ and ‘hypertriglyceridemia’. The whirling energy of Volpone’s pseudo-family, offset by the languid villainy of the fox himself, ensured the audience both sympathised with the roguish crew and longed to see their come-uppance. The victims of Volpone and Mosca’s various schemes are given equally animalistic names by Jonson, as a way of revealing their own venal natures; Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio, (the raven) and Corvino (the crow). Again, bravura performances from the young actors raised these characters from merely allegorical stock figures into more engaging, and so more detestable, personalities. Tom Whittaker produced a physically captivating performance, bending double at the waist to capture Corbaccio’s age, while Tyreece Asamoah brought a real sense of brutality to his portrayal of Corvino, swishing a riding-crop with menace as he sought to portray the internal conflict between Corvino’s jealous protection of his wife, Celia, and his avaricious desire to get his talons on Volpone’s supposed wealth. The portrayal of Celia, often little more than a cypher within this play, is particularly demanding, and it is remarkable that Ashley Austin, who managed to capture both the fragility and the dignity of the woman, was here appearing in his first play. Her eventual escape, along with Corbaccio’s wronged son, Bonario (Josh Gooding), produced a dramatically and morally satisfying end to the play. This conclusion comes in a series of increasingly complex courtroom scenes, as the various plotters attempt to deceive both the judges and each other, knowing that slips in their stories could land them with hefty punishments. It takes deft timing and careful direction to exploit the comic potential of such a fraught series of scenes, and this production managed to extract humour from even the more unlikely sources; the four avocatores (Frank Kauer, Max Joynson, Ben Tudor and William MacNeal) adopted a bickering approach that at points verged on Monty Python, as well as exploiting the comic asides written into Jonson’s text. However it was Joey Fleming, playing the shyster Voltore, who stole the show. His bombastic lawyer ran verbal rings
around the judges, before being forced to run all the way back in a vain attempt to escape the snares being set for him; should acting not appeal to Joey in the longer term, perhaps a career at the Bar – or behind them! While the intricacies of the main plot played out in court, the comic subplot found its denouement beneath a hand-painted tortoise-shell (another contribution from clan Croally, alongside the musical accompaniments). The satirical swipes at English pretensions can seem rather secondary in Jonson’s play, and yet here the vibrancy of the character-acting from Mitchell Simmonds as Lady Politick-Would-Be and her wannabe-spy husband, Sir Politick Would-Be, ensured that this tale was every bit as engaging as the main plot. Few pantomime dames can have drawn as many laughs as Mitchell’s English dame elicited, and credit must also be given to Jim Bannister, playing the straight-man, Peregrine, who allowed the character’s quiet shrewdness to set off the Politick Would-Bes buffoonery. Peregrine’s final dig at England’s footballing pretensions – penned surely by a disappointed Mr Trevill – reminds us that we English can still make fools of ourselves on the international stage, but not always as enjoyably as in this play. To take a play of such complexity, both in plot and language, and produce it in a school is a remarkable feat; to do so and make it so thoroughly enjoyable is a ‘miraculous effect’ of which even the mountebank Scoto would have been proud. At the end of the play, the Avocatores bid the audience to take heart that the bestial vices of Volpone et al have been suitably rewarded; we in turn should recognise this productions many virtues, from the bold direction, the raucous music and especially the outstanding performances, and ensure that they too are suitably applauded.
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