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Hobbes lacks heat

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  19.11.08

There are some rare plays over which one would like to draw a veil. For others, of which Adriano Shaplin’s The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes is an outstanding example, only a set of tight gags would do. For the assorted century philosophers, new scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and experimenters of Cromwell’s last years and the first of the Restoration, who clog The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes as thickly as bad cholesterol does the arteries of a sick man, babble, dispute and chatter to dizzying inconsequence and mind-defying tedium. Some of the printed text has been cut from performance. Still the bemused brain shrinks and cowers, battered by intellectual shadow-boxing.

Shaplin himself, an RSC resident playwright and founder of the experimental underground troupe, The Riot Group, and whose play Pugilist Specialist I much admired, has written sections in cod blank verse, vainly confessing it would be “great if people had the occasional impression this was a lost history play”. If only it had been — lost that is. For Shaplin’s attempt to write verse is of a dogged ineptitude and wooziness that would be funny if his intentions were not serious.

“Knowledge is an old, handed-down thing ... I’ve noticed knowledge hangs around, it hangs on men,” muses the play’s hero, Robert Boyle, a natural philosopher, chemist and physicist of the post-Restoration age who is mysteriously played by a woman. Amanda Hadingue’s stiff, wooden Boyle is said to be in grappling conflict with Stephen Boxer’s grey 17th century political thinker, Thomas Hobbes. No crucial bone of contention, though, is seriously worried over.

Handsomely staged by Soutra Gilmour on three-tiered, scaffolded playing areas that accommodate the changes of location from Coffee house to Boyle’s laboratory, the play is set amidst the lives of the experimenting new scientists. Jack Laskey’s ardent Hooke typically appears with bellows and tools to do frightful things to an unseen dog and broods over the significance of a dead horse. Two essentially irrelevant actors, played with amusing, nonchalant verve by Angus Wright and James Garnon show off their credentials when Charles II reopens theatres.

Elizabeth Freestone’s production encourages sound and fury modes of acting. Those knowing next to nothing about Hobbes or Boyle will leave none the wiser about them.
Until 6 December (0844 800 1118).

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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