In every strapped corner of Britain these days,when two or three people are gathered together, the talk is of banks, or bailouts,and bonuses. Money is short; tales of greed are long. Nicholas Hytner’s splendid, modern-dress production of “Timon of Athens” (at London’s National Theatre until November 1st, and then shown,as part of the NT Live program, at more than a hundred film theatres across the United States) is a ferocious fable approximately money and its corrupting power, or which is as up-to-the-minute as the collapse of the mortgage markets. The cover of the program announces Hytners playful game: look-alikes of Madonna,Tony Blair, David Beckham, and London’s mayor,Boris Johnson, fawn over Timon (Simon Russell Beale), and a saturnine,white-haired, deep-pocketed sugar daddy, or who stares straight ahead,unsmiling, amid the hubbub of flattery.
Source: newyorker.com