Responses from audiences appear to have been highly positive. William Yeoman described the play’s reception at the performance he attended: ‘I never expected an audience to laugh so hard or burst into so much spontaneous applause during the performance of a early 17th century play as it did on Friday night’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009). As often appears to be the case for successful productions of The Alchemist, a range of performances were mentioned by reviewers. Patrick Dickson’s ‘repulsive and engaging’ Subtle was balanced by Andrew Tighe’s Face, played ‘with precision and steadiness’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009; Canberra Times, 2 May 2009). Georgina Symes’s leggy, bewigged Doll Common reminded many commentators of Amy Winehouse, and Symes commented in an interview, ‘I like the idea of Dol being a bit of a bower bird; that she collects things from her life and has stolen things from people so she is actually able to become a different woman depending on who she is with’ (Christian Wilkinson, Guardian Express, 12 May 2009). As such, she was perhaps the ultimate expression of the production’s magpie tendency.

Russell Kiefel’s Lovewit was ‘a spivvy wheeler-dealer with a machine-gun laugh’, David Whitney’s Mammon was obese and ‘hilariously gross’, Scott Witt’s Kastril was viewed by one reviewer as a cross between Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical suburban gangster-wannabe Ali G and racing jockey Darren Beadman, and Liz Skitch’s Dame Pliant ‘blinks obtusely and shuffles about without a clue’ (Jo Litson, Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2009; Canberra Times, 2 May 2009). The production also entertainingly and pointedly differentiated between Ananias and Tribulation, like Armfield’s 1996 production selectively Australianising elements of the play; as Yeoman describes, ‘If Peter Kowitz is part-Amish, part-American evangelical preacher as Tribulation Wholesome, it’s the tight-suited Richard Sydenham who shines the spotlight on our own religious and political environment, his Ananias a formidable combination of John Howard, George Pell and Tony Abbott’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009). Satire of the right-wing politicians Howard and Abbott, and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney, known for his conservative views on some social issues, rooted The Alchemist in specific topical contexts.

Later in the year, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s revival in Washington, DC, was less warmly received. Director Michael Kahn had a strong record with Shakespeare and Jonson, having staged fondly remembered productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Epicene. However, like its Stratford Festival predecessor in 1999, this modern-dress production appeared to be in thrall to its own eclectic costumes. The effect was seemingly heightened by James Noone’s set, in which Lovewit’s home was a luxury town-house with nine doors, closed off by a hard front curtain, representing its façade, in Act 5. The façade was in place as the audience entered and ‘its tidy classicism, and the demure pre-show music, created a decorous effect that was shattered by blaring rock as the play began’ (James Loehlin, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1 [2010], 186). The updating was also clear in the text, in which – for once – Dame Pliant’s reference to the Armada was removed; her hatred for Spaniards instead stemmed ‘from a bad paella’ (Loehlin, 187). Loehlin suggested that Subtle (Kyle Fabel) and Doll (Kate Skinner) were ‘cast as older characters, rather worn out in their respective trades’ (186), a tactic that was coherent enough but left rather too much work for Michael Milligan’s Face, who had to maintain much of the play’s comic energy.

For Jayne Blanchard the production resembled ‘a vaudevillian runway show, as endless costumes sashay across the stage’ (Washington Times, 16 October 2009). Subtle, Face, and Doll assumed new costumes for each of the gulls, their quick changes underlining the production’s emphasis on fluidity and instability. David Sabin’s Mammon had borrowed ‘Donald Trump’s fat-cat suits and dipsy-doodle comb-over’, changing into ‘a flashy gold Elvis get-up’ when he thought that he was about to gain the philosopher’s stone; Jeff Biehl’s Drugger was a hippie; Nick Cordileone’s Dapper ‘glide[d] in like one of the sports of “Guys and Dolls”’, at one point even singing ‘Luck Be a Lady’, while Timothy Thomas’s drawling Tribulation was ‘a Jimmy-Swaggert-style televangelist in a frosted pompadour and white suit’. Doll Common ‘descend[ed] a staircase in the glittery pouffe of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North’ (Washington Times, 16 October 2009;Loehlin, 186-7; Peter Marks, Washington Post, 13 October 1999). The overall result seemed merely to wear reviewers out.

Around the turn of the decade, three relatively low-profile productions in The Alchemist’s home town, London, epitomised different approaches to the play. Scarlett Plouviez Comnas’s revival, which opened at the Rosemary Branch theatre in Islington, in March 2010, used a modern-day setting; in Time Out, Andrzej Lukowski thought that Keving Millington’s ‘slimy’ Subtle reminded him of the television and stage illusionist Derren Brown, and wondered whether Daniel Moore’s Mammon was ‘a rather nice parody of that other noted bumbler, Boris Johnson’, then Mayor of London (Time Out, 1 April 2010). The following September, Firehouse Creative Productions’ revival at Hoxton Hall, an old music hall in East London, re-imagined the play with the help of testimony from people on Hoxton Street Market. Except for the opening prologue, which retained Jonson’s language with the addition of some contemporary references, the dialogue was modernised (Lukowski, Time Out, 2 September 2010); the action was explicitly located in the theatre itself, Face becoming the caretaker, Dave. However, Jonson’s narrative was retained, and many of the strategies taken in characterising and costuming the gulls were familiar from earlier productions: ‘There’s a city lawyer with a gambling problem, a new age hippy with lesbian leanings, a daft and horny toff investing in the development of the philosopher’s stone and eternal life, a pair of Sloaney siblings comprising a posh boy with gangsta aspirations and his stupid heiress sister and a deranged American Scientologist mother and daughter’ (Lindsey Clarke, Londonist, 1 September 2010, http://londonist.com/2010/09/theatre_review_the_alchemist_hoxton.php ).