The Duchess (of Malfi) by Zinnie Harris rips into John Webster’s bloody Renaissance tragedy to reassert its timelessness: it’s a play about women subjugated and victimised by horrific violence. Even the newly widowed Duchess, with her vast lands and sumptuous privilege, isn’t able to achieve sexual autonomy and keep her life intact. Her two brothers function as neurotic jailors, holding the keys to her erotic availability and punishing her when she disobeys their will.
Jodie Whittaker makes a commanding presence as the Duchess. When we first see her, it is not in widow’s weeds with bleary eyes but aflame with desire, as suggested by her plush red velvet dress, beautifully conceived by costume designers Tom Piper and Max Johns. The Duchess croons about longing to a sentimental backing track, showcasing Whittaker’s surprising vocal talent and giving the stage the feel, albeit momentarily, of a 1940s music hall. The object of her romantic affections is Joel Fry’s comically bumbling steward, Antonio; although possessed of numerous inferiority complexes, he remains enjoyably irritating and endearing throughout. And, of course, there are villains: Ferdinand (an incestuous Rory Fleck Byrne) and the gloriously wicked Cardinal (Paul Ready), who hatch complots and have clearly read Machiavelli.
Tom Piper’s clinical set strips away the pretences of this ‘palace’ (that the characters persist in calling it this is faintly absurd). Action unfolds in what looks like the corridors of a prison, with a gantry appropriately installed for spying and sliding metal grills pulled across for scenes in the Cardinal’s cell. Ben Ormerod’s lighting is complimentary. Taking cues from poet and playwright Tony Harrison’s assertion that ‘crimes should be brought out into the sun’, the lighting is white, glaring, and penetrative, making the point that, despite her secrecy, there is nowhere for the Duchess to hide.
Harris’s script and direction flounder due to an excess of ideas. Seventeenth-century social mores are retained, such as the expectation for widows to remain unmarried; yet the programme locates this reworking in the 1950s/early 60s (on the basis, it seems, of aesthetic appeal alone). Weaved into this are Harris’s debts to film, which, although interesting, fail to cohere: stylised character names aggressively projected onto the stage recall Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and the Duchess’s orgiastic groans over an apricot are akin to the sandwich eating scene in When Harry Met Sally (1989). The result is something highly watchable but which feels like a work-in-progress.
Michael John McCarthy’s vision for the soundscape of the play is similarly jarring. In the first half of the play, female characters express themselves in slow melodic songs. The second half, by contrast, opens with torturous buzzing, gunfire and screams; the Duchess is made to watch a video of her children and husband facing a firing squad. The footage, it turns out, is fake, but the brutality continues unremittingly.
In ‘Whispers of Immortality’ T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin’. Harris’s production exhumes the play and draws it away from its tragic inheritance: her Bosola survives, repents his ways, and raises the Duchess’s son. It’s a bold intellectual experiment, an imaginative reaching for hope and redemption. Harris can undoubtedly claim, ‘Mine is another voyage.’
Drama
Adapted and Directed by Zinnie Harris
Photo credits: Marc Brenner
Cast includes: Jodie Whittaker; Joel Fry; Rory Fleck Byrne; Jude Owusu; Paul Ready; Elizabeth Ayodele; Hubert Burton; Matti Houghton.
Until: Friday 20th December 2024
Running Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including an interval