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Lockdown Conversations - Cast - August / September 2020
Interviewer: ELLIS J. WELLS - Chronicles & Tales - Role: Lucilius
Interviewee: Bruce Kitchener - Role: Lucius

MISANTHROPOS - Production Status : Filming - Postponed due to COVID-19 crisis
This decision is made with the safety of everyone as our foremost consideration.
QUINTESSENCE Studios and its producers will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Estimated Release Date: 2022

Lockdown Conversations - Bruce Kitchener - Role: Lucius - MISANTHROPOS.

Dan Popescu - Singer - Basso Profondo
Role: Gorgon

Hello Dan, I hope you're well in semi-isolation (Brasov - Romania) and not driving your neighbours too crazy with practicing opera! I'll start simply and ask what was your first exposure to Shakespeare, if you can remember?

Hello Ellis. I am very well and my neighbours are also well since now we are allowed to practice in the theatre. There are hopes that we will come back to (almost) fully normal activities after September 15th. To answer your question my first contact with Shakespeare's plays were the BBC Television Shakespeare series that I saw at the Romanian National Television in the 90's.

What is Shakespeare like in Romania?

Prof. Ladan Niayesh
Literary Advisor

Focusing specifically on the play "Timon of Athens"; let's settle the debate once and for all: is it a tragedy or a problem play?

The answer to your question depends on your definition of “tragedy”. In the first Folio of 1623 (that is the first edition of Shakespeare’s complete works), "Timon of Athens" is grouped with the tragedies. The other two categories in the volume are comedies and histories, and obviously Timon could not belong to either of those other options. It is a tragedy insofar as its action is based on human suffering and a catharsis (purging of emotions), with the fate of the central figure inspiring pity and fear (the two expected Aristotelian tragic emotions) in the audience. But the action fails to fully qualify as a standard tragic action in five stages neatly following the rise and fall of a hero, complete with a final catastrophe involving an onstage death in the early modern English tradition. Here, the hero’s fall occurs much earlier than at the end, and he dies offstage, in a kind of ellipsis. The defiant, fighting dimension of heroism, meanwhile, is transferred to another character, Alcibiades, who embodies the nemesis of Athens here and who closes the play in Timon’s absence, making the denouement problematic. So all in all, we have a play and its eponymous character resisting and rejecting tragic heroism and a proper denouement, making this a problem play, or a ‘problem tragedy’ if you prefer.

It is now established that Shakespeare collaborated with Thomas Middleton to write "Timon of Athens"; how does this play differ from Shakespeare's solo body of work either in structure, tone, lyrical pace, etc.