Timon of Athens, one of the canon’s orphans, recently got a solid production from the National Actors Theatre. Last year, the floundering company, brainchild of personality Tony Randall, brought in as artistic advisor Michael Langham, who had done stints as artistic director at the Stratford Festival in Ontario (1955–67) and at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (1971–77). Indeed, Langham first directed Timon in Canada in 1963, when he commissioned the brooding Duke Ellington score used in this production; he tried it again in Canada in 1991, with Brian Bedford as Timon, as here. Thus the New York mounting is in the nature of a road show, especially considering Langham has brought his set designer and his sound designer with him. Langham, it should be remembered, lent competence and respectability to the Randall enterprise with last year’s Saint Joan.

The “Athens” of the production is an Art Deco, de Chirico-esque Mayfair salon dominated by a sculpture of a toothbrush. It is the time of Noël Coward. A poetaster is telling fortunes. Jazz is tinkling. A party in progress is interrupted by police in vaguely fascistic uniforms come to arrest a noble for debt. Enter prodigal magnifico Timon, clad in a chic cream suit, who pays the debt, buys a painting, endows a servant with a dowry—in short, enacts numerous gestures of compulsive generosity. The action freezes at moments in order that the Cynic, a tuxedoed journalist, might flay hypocrisy. There ensues a heaped banquet, hosted by Timon