SOURCE: Carnegy, Patrick. “Rout of the World.” The Spectator 283, no. 8926 (4 September 1999): 38-40.

In the following review, Carnegy discusses Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Timon of Athens. Carnegy calls the production “a superb staging” and praises Michael Pennington's Timon.

The RSC rounds off what's been a strong season with Gregory Doran's arresting production of one of Shakespeare's most uncomfortable and seldom-given plays. Timon of Athens, we just about remember, is the one about the man who spends the first half of the play as a munificent philanthropist and the second as a beggared misanthropist.

It was clever to have paired it in repertory with Antony and Cleopatra for the plays are proximate in Shakespeare's output. In both the hero's downfall is triggered by a fatal lack of judgment, Antony's unhinged by infatuation with Cleopatra, Timon's by intoxication with his wealth's power to draw friends. It would have...