Just after the interval, when the title character’s henchman Mosca remarks, “We have lived like Grecians,” he means for pleasure, not beyond their means. Yet on many other occasions here Ben Jonson’s text is indeed updated. The ridiculous schemer Sir Politic Would-Be speaks of global warming and crop circles; his wife is, to all intents and purposes, Katie Price: a vapid media personality with permanent entourage and cameraman.

Jonson remains a playwright to admire intensely rather than to love. He virtually never gives any of his characters an easy time of it; as a viewer, you have to enjoy comeuppance and not care too much about vindication, let alone reward. This simultaneously explains why Henry Goodman takes the approach he does in the lead of Trevor Nunn’s RSC revival, and why it is doomed to failure.

Goodman is a first-rate actor, immensely skilled at finding the heart of a character. This he does here, instilling Volpone with human motivations and his own performance with compassion. But wait a tick... Volpone is a greedy trickster who disguises himself as a doddering invalid to play three other avaricious types off against each other as they each ply him with rich gifts in the hope of being made his heir. This is not a character to humanise; it fatally blunts the jagged edge of the comedy. Goodman is at his most ebulliently Jonsonian when pretending to be a mountebank peddling his cure-all: lots of contemporary references, oo-er accent gags, and more energy than he draws on in the rest of the play combined.

This strikes me as a directorial rather than an actorly misjudgement. It is characteristic of Nunn to give events time to play out naturally; however, this often leads to a pace too sluggish, as naturalness cripples dramatic momentum. Orion Lee as Mosca is the prime example here, playing his own responses at an almost stately speed rather than that of the play itself. Miles Richardson, Geoffrey Freshwater and Matthew Kelly as the “suitors” give the grotesque brio required, but at the centre of the evening is a demonstration that naturalism, just like the mountebank Scoto’s miraculous oil, is far from the universal panacea some may believe.
 
Written for the Financial Times.