An act of gross theatrical indecency has been perpetrated. The Royal Shakespeare Company converts John Webster's tremendous Jacobean Revenge drama into the stage equivalent of a Hammer horror movie, with a touch of Rocky Horror chucked in too.
When the Duchess of Malfi induces laughter in the wrong, serious places, as it sometimes did on Friday, you deduce something has gone wrong. Director Gale Edwards fails to discover a suitably Websterian style and atmosphere. The scenes of high suffering, where the widowed Duchess is tormented and strangled for secretly marrying beneath her, or when her murderous brother goes out of his guilty mind, become ludicrous, not horrifying.
Webster's grand melancholia and pessimism, his sense of a world seething with corruption are faintly evoked. Miss Edwards unwisely updates the play to a clichéd 1960s Dolce Vita Italy. Yet Webster's Jacobean milieu, with its witchcraft fears and Roman Catholic corruption, its Malcontent Revenger, its mockery of a marriage masque and piercing sense of mortality, resists being yanked from its context. Peter J Davison's ugly stage set, with a mottled terracotta wall, vertically sliding panels, incomplete lamppost and a central, tall glasshouse, which sometimes distorts perspective, is unfairly meaningless.
The first glimpse of the play's corrupt court society consists of dozens of balloons and gallivanting partygoers. How decadent! These party people are caught in that glasshouse structure, where later, a tableau of the Duchess's supposedly murdered husband and children look ridiculously like slabs of meat. Here too the sexually obsessed madmen, grotesque rather than disturbing, saunter and moan. All performances seem mis-begotten - overpitched and roaring. Actors rush at their speeches, growling and barking like frantic dogs in hot pursuit of rabbits.
Black leather drearily serves as an emblem of kinky wickedness. Colin Tierney, as the Duchess's incestuously smitten brother, Ferdinand, revels in camp petulance rather than cruelty, his mania absurd and pangs of conscience minimal. Ken Bones's wicked Cardinal brother humps his latest mistress astride a huge cross but is otherwise merely lurid. Aisling O'Sullivan, as a red-headed, handsome Duchess hankers mildly for Richard Lintern's listless homme fatale of a steward. She unbelievably keeps her sarcastic cool, instead of struggling to preserve it, when facing torment and a death sentence. Valiant Tom Mannion, taking over as Bosola at very short-notice is less a malcontent, murderer and revenger than a freelance snarler.
The Duchess Of Malfi
