I’ve had a few Jacobean treats this year
already – Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, cloistral
and masque-like, at the Old Vic; a febrile Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Barbican; an almost perfect King Lear at the Almeida, and now The Changeling at the Young Vic.
It’s a harrowing play, its tale of lustful
murders and lunacy spilling its guts everywhere. A collaboration between Thomas
Middleton and William Rowley, it sees Beatrice-Joanna fall for the seemingly upright
Alsemero. The only problem is, she’s betrothed to another; naturally, the only
sensible thing to do is to get the man she hates with all her blood, the
disfigured and corrupt De Flores, to kill him. As counterpart to this is a
subplot involving a young gentleman who inveigles his way into a lunatic asylum
– as a patient – so that he can sate his lusts on the beautiful wife of the
doctor.
The stage set was like a school gymnasium,
with a blue mattress and a net that served as a sort of membrane between our
world and the world of the stage, as well as a means of seeing ghosts and
spying on others. The setting was a modern European one – perhaps a dictator’s
house – all neat uniforms and tottering high heels. The lunatic asylum was like
something from a futuristic nightmare: cages, unshapely figures, screaming.
We first encountered Beatrice (played with
brash passion by Sinead Matthews) on her knees, praying, and Alsemero (a brisk
Harry Hadden-Paton), believing her to be a shining light of virtue - or at least convincing himself that his sexual feelings were noble - falling for
her and offering his hand on the spot.
But, just as the castle hides dark places
where murders happen, all of the characters hide darker parts of themselves.
And Beatrice is not capable of knowing the meaning of words like honour and
virtue, though she bandies them about with vim. She hides a serpent in her bosom
– and links her fate, as tightly as the bounds that chained Prometheus to a
rock, to De Flores. Everything will fall apart: nothing virtuous can live,
nothing pure, nothing bright; Daiphanta the maiden, perhaps the only pure thing
in the text, will suffer as surely as the corrupted murderers; the paranoid doctor's wife, who remains chaste (in the sense that she doesn't succumb to temptation) is still married to the doctor at the end.
The play had an insane, rushing momentum. Characters shifted in and out of the subplot – De Flores
rising from a cupboard in the mad scene; Piracquo doubling as the doctor,
Alibius; the counterfeit madman Antonius ("Tony") as Piracquo’s brother. At first I
thought these were a heavy-handed way of drawing comparisons between the court
and the madhouse; but as the play progressed I saw the sense (hah) of it. In
this production, everything is mad and leads towards madness. There is no room
for folly here.The final scene showed this perfectly, with Alsemero all but
gibbering his lines and hopping about like a madman - the relatively trite lines about "change" sucked into the whirl of the ending, and showing that, in fact, there was no change; the Duke weeping on the
floor; and Beatrice and her lover, De Flores, those “twins of mischief”, dead
and defiled.
The cast were superb, treading the line between tragedy and comedy with a surefootedness; although, occasionally gabbling their lines at the end, it seemed fitting, as if nothing could stop this terrible breaking apart. The scenes in the mental asylum were brutally uncomfortable; the dance of the madmen was cleverly superimposed on the wedding of Beatrice and Alsemero, shading into a hilarious dumb show.
This is a steam-train of a production, full
of weird lights and clever touches; aware of the magnificent horror of this
play as well as its ridiculousnesses and excesses. And there is a sex scene in
which food is put to usages I’ve never seen before.
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