Michaelmas Term review

This year’s production by Edward’s Boys, with performances in March in Stratford, Oxford, and London, was Michaelmas Term by Thomas Middleton, a look at the lives of fashionable men about town, devious moneylenders, and sceptical women in the London of 1604. It calls for exceptional skill from the performers, particularly in its central scene depicting an elaborate swindle: a naïve young man, Easy, in need of ready cash, is lured into a sure-fire scheme to raise money through purchase and resale of goods, which only results in substantial losses. To understand how this unfamiliar scam works, and why it looks so appealing to Easy, requires utter clarity and careful presentation from the actors, and we certainly got that here. Such clarity was particularly evident in performances by Tom Howitt and Jed Trimnell as, respectively, the endlessly shape-shifting Shortyard and Falselight, by Enrique Burchell as the aspiring but credulous Easy, and by Will Groves as the predatory shopkeeper Quomodo, mastermind of the swindle, self-satisfied but also adept at adopting the different personae required by his schemes.

This central intrigue is part of a complex web of interconnections and misrecognitions among three families and across a wide social range: from two parents who work as servants while seeking their wayward children, to the newly and smugly wealthy Lethe, a superb performance by Thapelo Ray that hinted at the venom concealed beneath the smoothness. But the whole effect of the play is a company effort, in this case a large and variously talented group of twenty-nine actors (who contributed to the superb music, alongside a quite brilliant band, in appropriate selections from Byrd through Blondie). The teeming city’s variety truly came across onstage with the well-differentiated and individual performances of so many actors. A particular pleasure of the show was the well-communicated perspective of players in small but essential roles, as with the boy who’s an apprentice to Quomodo, clearly on to his boss’s schemes, here played by Adriel Vipin. Unlike many works about scams and swindles, Michaelmas Term always includes such perspectives opposed to the swindlers and the glamour that their skill creates and these ironies were deftly conveyed.

I saw the performance in the Parliament Chamber of the Inner Temple in London: the world of legal London would have been familiar to the kind of young men on the make who throng the play, and it begins with a prologue evoking the predation of the less scrupulous lawyers there: “From wronger and from wronged I have fee.” Michaelmas Term isn’t a play about innocents encountering villains, but about the more and less astute, a modern kind of work without a hero, a world in which everyone is eager to gamble or seek profit. After its first half in which Easy is fleeced of all his money, the play pivots to a new series of events in which Quomodo fakes his own death in order to enjoy observing how much everyone loves him, only to see how little anyone regrets his loss, and how swiftly his wife Thomasine finds a new partner. Joe McCormack as Thomasine vividly conveyed her dismay at Quomodo’s machinations and determination to do things differently once he seems to be gone. Like so many scams, Quomodo’s falls apart because he tries to take it too far, and his cynical use of legal devices is revealed to a judge who sorts out everyone’s fate.

The four-hundred-year-old language was always expertly and easily conveyed in this production, and also accompanied by an individual and distinctive physical manner for every character. And the text delivered was complete! Plays of Shakespeare’s time are normally very heavily abridged and adapted for present-day performance; it is rare to see even a Shakespeare play uncut. Another local performing group, the Royal Shakespeare Company, did another Middleton comedy, A Mad World, My Masters, in 2013, in an extensively rewritten version; but it was Edward’s Boys in 2009 who did it unmodified. Michaelmas Term also was performed with a full text, though in this case with the addition of a few dozen lines to round out one story originally left tantalizingly unresolved, of the father (Cameron Spruce) who winds up servant to his wayward daughter (Rufus Round), neither recognizing the other as transformed by London. Middleton chose never to have the two realize the truth; it seemed right that in this production they do. And plays of the period rarely specify action in the detail that which we now expect from scripts, so productions must recognize the requirements of the story and respond to them. Here, for example, Quomodo’s ‘funeral’ becomes a major scene in its own right, and the wedding scene in the last act, just a few lines on the page, becomes a major brawl as Lethe’s ambitions are finally restrained.

Scholars record one other ‘production’ of the play since the seventeenth century, a script-in-hand reading at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008. There may be as many as a dozen people on the planet who have seen both. As one of them, I can say that Edward’s Boys conveyed the heart of the play far more effectively.