Passion Play

LOVE’S SACRIFICE

The Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Monday 27^th April, 2015

 

There’s often a reason why a play isn’t performed for centuries: it’s not very good or its day has come and gone and there is nothing of relevance to it. With this in mind, I settle into my seat at the RSC’s Swan and try to keep an open mind.

John Ford (you know, him – he wrote Tis Pity She’s A Whore) gives us a tragedy, the likes of which opera has been thriving on for yonks. Two best friends, one woman, loved by both but married by one… It can only end badly.

Matthew Needham is excellent as The Duke, whose emotions are never far from the surface. He is an exuberant hedonist, when things are going his way, but there is the suggestion he could become unhinged at any moment – we see flashes of his violent temper. His bride Bianca (Catrin Stewart) is perky and lively, and obeys her husband’s instructions to treat his bff Fernando (Jamie Thomas King) like a second husband, in all ways except one, of course! Bianca and Fernando get the hots for each other but never consummate their passion, despite a few stolen moments – enough to get the villain of the piece plotting and scheming. Stewart and King go through the anguishes of love without the pleasure, matching Needham’s emotional outpourings in intensity. As the villain D’Avolos, Jonathan McGuinness is a snide and unctuous presence, Iago with an admin job – and it almost looks like he will get away with it.

There is a couple of subplots, one of which ends horribly. Arrogant womaniser Ferentes (Andy Apollo making an impression) gets his comeuppance in a masque, when three of his conquests decide to have a stab at vengeance. Superannuated fop Mauriccio (an exquisite Matthew Kelly) has a happier ending – if banishment and marriage are anything to go by – and his relationship with Brummie servant Giacopo (Colin Ryan) is both funny and touching. Kelly and Ryan are a little and large double act with perfect comic timing – I find I am more moved by the resolution to their story than I am to the main plot.

Beth Cordingly is strong as strident widow Fiormonda, and Marcus Griffiths’s Roseilli, banished but comes back disguised as a simpleton, cuts a dash, but is too removed from the main action – This is a fault of the writer.

On the whole, it’s a watchable, rewarding piece with passions running as high as the production values and well worth sacrificing an evening to see. Anna Fleischle’s design conveys the period beautifully, but the projections on the back wall add little beyond mood lighting – I am too busy watching the actors to take much notice of these effects. There is, for my taste, a little too much of the discordant music. Director Matthew Dunster interrupts the action with interludes of dumb show – I could do without these. He also adds many humorous touches, heightening the comedy to match the intensity of the drama.

Many of the plot points can be traced to Shakespeare but I come away thinking about the great Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega, a playwright The Swan would do well to feature – in translation, of course!

Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be…
(Colin Ryan and Matthew Kelly. Photo: Helen Maybanks)

Whore’s Play

‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE
Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Saturday 4th February, 2012

John Ford’s 17th century pot-boiler is given a contemporary setting in Cheek By Jowl’s touring production. Central to the set is a bed, complete with random junk underneath it, and clothes and detritus strewn around it, as though Tracey Emin was the maid. The cast dance on in smart suits. There’s a Reservoir Dogs/Guy Ritchie gangster vibe – these are people with their own code and people who do not shy from using violence to impose their will.

Straight away, we are flung into a world of incest and betrayals. Giovanni (Jack Gordon) impregnates his own sister, Annabella (Lydia Wilson), who is then married off to Soranzo (Jack Hawkins) who doesn’t appreciate her tainted state and sets servant Vasques (Laurence Spellman) to discover the identity of the baby’s father. Vasques, delivering his lines in the broadest East End of London accent, is darkly funny. He thwarts the plot of spurned widow Hippolita (Suzanne Burden) to poison his employer, and seduces and tortures the truth from Annabella’s maid, Putana (Lizzie Hopley).

A door upstage leads to a bathroom. It is in here that most of the nastiness and violence takes place. We glimpse it, we overhear it, we imagine the worst. This makes any onstage unpleasantness more shocking. Director Declan Donnellan infuses the production with a wealth of ideas. There is a mixture of the sacred and the profane. The bed becomes an altar; the cast form tableaux based on religious images. They murmur prayers beneath the action. They sing Latin incantations. They dance a conga, filing past the Cardinal to kiss his ring, in a parody of ritual. The humour counterpoints the dark subject matter and the company of actors give a physically demanding and vocally diverse performance.

There is a great deal of taking off of shirts and throwing them away. Everything ends up on the bedroom floor. It is a violation of a private space, in keeping with the subject matter.

The ending is cut. The characters are left reeling in shock at the discovery of Annabella’s mutilated body, while Giovanni sits on the bed, holding his sister’s heart, altogether insane. This is somehow bleaker than the multiple deaths and reckonings Ford supplies, in this context at any rate.

It is a gripping production with plenty going on throughout. A wealth of ideas serves the plot and the transposition to a contemporary setting works very well. Cream of the crop for was Laurence Spellman as the plain-speaking factotum and also Jack Hawkins as Soranzo, a nasty piece of work with a gloss of respectability. You wouldn’t want him coming at you with a wire coat hanger. But really the entire company proves yet again that Cheek By Jowl create entertaining, intriguing and innovative work, imbuing classic texts with new life.