If Shakespeare were alive in 2025, would he be a songwriter? The Rape of Lucrece at Wilton’s Music Hall certainly makes a compelling case. Taking the bard’s lesser-known narrative poem, first written in 1594 during the plague years, Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan and pianist Feargal Murray give it fresh life by accompanying it with an original music composition. A timeless story of lust and innocence, honour and shame, in turn, is incarnated as a piece of poetic confession, where song is the rivulet for intense emotional expression.
With a narrative filched from the pages of Livy and Ovid, Shakespeare’s poem charts the ravishment of Lucrece, wife of Collatine, a Roman officer. Settled at camp in Ardea, her loose-lipped husband boasts of his wife’s peerless beauty and chastity to his fellow officers, gaining the attention of Tarquin, the king’s son. Misled by the ‘trustless wings of false desire’, he pursues his passion relentlessly, defying all reason and betraying the majestic splendour of his station. Lucrece, unable to bear the shame of her ruination, frees herself with suicide, and in doing so, inadvertently establishes the Roman republic.
O’Sullivan takes on all three roles – narrator, victim and preparator. She approaches each character with a light touch, allowing the power of Shakespeare’s words to excavate psychology. Her narrator is deeply sympathetic and inclined to mournful refrains. Tarquin is rightly presented as an expert sexual manipulator, dominating the stage with a devilish swagger, a wolf on the prowl, nose high in the air and primed to sniff out uncorrupted beauty. For Lucrece, O’Sullivan shifts into a higher, more fragile key. At the moment of ravishment, she drops to the floor, her limbs writhing, beating, like a butterfly trapped under a glass. The tussle is conveyed expressionistically with a black coat; as Tarquin, she mangles, squeezes and mounts it, leaving a visceral impression of horror. Even theatregoers with their eyes closed couldn’t escape the torment; Lucrece’s thin, lucid screams bled through the air.
Elizabeth Freestone’s direction from the original Royal Shakespeare Company production is retained to excellent effect. It works quietly, stealthily – like Tarquin himself – and opts for simplicity to make a show of Shakespeare’s verbal ornamentation. True to the text, we are given a ‘black stage for tragedies’, complicitous with evil-doing and symbolic of grief. Yet the lighting designer, at poignant moments, injects violent throbs of colour. The stage wall is almost turned into a sensate human body, blushing to pale rose when Lucrece’s delicate beauty is described, and swelling scarlet when Tarquin declares ‘desire his pilot’.
The piano accompaniment by Murray thoughtfully echoes O’Sullivan’s pointed strains. Now ascending on the strength of passion, now collapsing under the weight of barely utterable pain. At the end, Murray runs his hands over the piano keys, creating a cacophony which suitably captures all the confusion, heartbreak, and glitters like so many shed tears. Even in moments where O’Sullivan’s diction slightly loses clarity due to the competing tune, what is gained is a powerful rawness of emotion, an immersion in the ‘helpless smoke of words’ which Shakespeare wrote of.
The Rape of Lucrece is a heartbreakingly good production. Everything that fresh and reimagined Shakespeare should be but seldom is. It brings to life the vigorous psychology of passion and pain that underwrites this poem, revealing how it too radiates with Shakespeare’s dramatic force. A froth of fleeting joy, to be sure.
The Rape of Lucrece
By William Shakespeare
Director: Elizabeth Freestone
Photo credits: Keith Pattison
Cast includes: Camille O’Sullivan and Feargal Murray
Until: Saturday 17th May 2025
Running Time: 1 hour and 20 minutes, with no interval
Review by Olivia Hurton