Bingo, Young Vic Theatre

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is the misleading, jokey title of a play about Shakespeare in his ignoble last years, unable to write further, isolated from his beloved London, and hemmed in by local politics. Shakespeare is invited to become a town councillor! To take sides in a dispute about land enclosures! It’s a cracking re-visioning of the genius whom films and myth have preserved in the aspic of lusty, piratic eloquence.

In Edward Bond's creation of 1974, Shakespeare is a middle-class capitalist literary squire, who sits in his big Stratford garden, rich, lionised and 52 (old, in those days), hasn’t written anything for five years since The Tempest, has a moaning wife he can’t abide, a nagging daughter, an oversexed old gardener, a brash landowner neighbour, and a fear that without his words he’s dying. He is asked to get involved in other people's desperate lives - a vagrant woman living off prostitution begs for help, an angry young man urges the peasants to resist enclosures - but Shakespeare signs up with the landowners to buy himself peace and quiet.

Bond was 40 when he wrote the play, and perhaps that’s why the attacks he sets up upon his Shakespeare feel like that of a son vigorously trying to land a telling blow on his father. It almost works, because in Sir Patrick Stewart’s performance you can so easily believe in the life portrayed. Writer’s burn-out is both risible and tragic - cocky Bond wants to suggest that moral burn-out was a relevant factor. In the fleetest and best scene, a jealous Ben Jonson (charismatic Richard McCabe in enormous, swelling breeches) beards Shakespeare in a Stratford pub, getting him drunk, taunting him with his air of superiority over other playwrights, with sitting in his rich man’s garden while the Globe burns down, with losing his touch. “You’ve been writing some peculiar stuff lately - what was The Winter’s Tale about?” he jeers. Stewart just sits and stares at him through narrowed eyes, saying nothing, and draining another goblet. (Stewart and McCabe, pictured right)

It's a damn good set-up, not nice but plausible - still I’m not sure that this really adds up to a play about characters who change, rather than a tiptilted hommage. The simple-minded gardener (struck accidentally by an axe in someone else’s fight - a ghoulishly funny idea) has shades of Poor Tom about him as Shakespeare has shades of Lear. The stand-off between the religious-zealot son and Matthew Marsh’s excellently smug landowner, Combe, is a black-and-white affair.