A straight-forward unengaging rendition of Edward Bond's Bingo with Patrick Stewart in his most lacklustre role yet.
Edward Bond's Bingo - Scenes of Money and Death centres on a conflicted and depressed William Shakespeare, played in Angus Jackson's production by a surprisingly static Patrick Stewart. In the midst of family turmoil, with his unseen wife suffering from a violent psychosis and his dutiful but blunt daughter, Judith (Catherine Cusack), full of hate for him, Shakespeare faces a greedy landowner who convinces him to sign an agreement securing his land at the expense of the workers who live on it.
But this production makes little effort to relate these Jacobean scenes of exploitation and shifting loyalties to present times, which makes this version far less engaging than it could be. Although you could also argue that to make the parallels obvious would patronise the audience.
While Jackson's production fails to take into account wider suggestions of the Bard's place in society today, Bond's script presents Shakespeare as art in its most traditional and confused sense. Here, this central character of our nation's theatrical chops is contradictory, solemn and eager to turn a blind eye to the cruelty around him, but ultimately unable to. He is bound up in financial concerns and the horrors that surround him whilst exacting his own brand of cruelty on his wife, child and tenants.
So he mainly just sits in his garden, preferring the company of an old man with mental health issues to that of his family. And this elderly servant with the mind of a randy child distracts and delights him with snowball games and his innocent take on the world – which is soon interrupted by his militantly puritanical son, played by a brilliantly loud and foreboding Alex Price. As the son fights sin in his own hypocritical way, he attempts to help workers who are blind to descriptions of a 17th century ugliness that they may well know but do not necessarily understand. It's quite a straightforward, often uninteresting comment on the place of art in a society with confused morals.
Shakespeare dwells on the severed heads outside the theatre gates and the pools of blood in the street but strangely Jackson's production, with design by Robert Innes Hopkins, isn't that gruesome. Aside from Bond's image of a burnt corpse hanging ominously over the stage, the characters are placed in warm light or clean white snow. And it's that snowball fight with the old man that becomes the one delight in Stewart's otherwise mediocre performance as he prances and plays, turning into a silly old man himself, longing for the pleasure and the company of youth. Aside from this scene, Stewart is wasted in this role as he takes on the sad and complacent Shakespeare, only occasionally treating us to someone who gets riled up enough to actually express his frustration. He makes it easy for Richard McCabe's funny, drunk Ben Johnson to steal the show with his take on the futility of writing during Shakespeare's last binge. But ultimately this is an unsurprising, easy take on money, death, and Shakespeare, that leaves little for the audience to sink their teeth into. 
Bingo - Scenes of Money and Death runs at Young Vic Theatre until 31st March
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