The Duchess of Malfi at the Old Vic, dir. James Lloyd: review

Eve Best as the Duchess

 "A prince's court
Is like a common fountain, whence should flow
Pure silver-drops in general. But if't chance
Some curs'd example poison't near the head,
Death and diseases through the whole land spread."
(Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene i, l.10)

It's a good time for Jacobean tragedies on the London stage - barely a fortnight ago I revelled in the adolescent fever-dream of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; now James Lloyd brings to the Old Vic a stately, portentous, wrenching production of John Webster's 1612ish The Duchess of Malfi, which is at once classic and innovative. The text has been cleverly edited - the beginning is shifted to solve some timing issues, for instance; the dumb show has been excised, as have characters that have little to do with the plot -  to make it knife sharp; or alternatively a hollow cave in which revenge gapes and roars, never quite knowing which way it has to turn or who its agent might be, and in which goodness is as fragile as the skin of an apricot.

Webster's entropic revenge tragedy sees a young widow, the Duchess of Malfi, forbidden by her royal brothers, the Duke Ferdinand (an excellent Harry Lloyd, who played him with sinister insanity, a quivering edginess that was thrilling and moving) and the Cardinal (a Machiavellian, martial Finbar Lynch) from marrying Antonio, her steward (played with Disney-esque heroism, shading into something more powerful, by Tom Bateman.) Antonio and the Duchess conceal their love, only for it to be revealed; they are banished, the Duchess imprisoned and then murdered.

Eve Best's Malfi shone out. She was the serious prince; the playful wife; the tender lover;  the wronged woman who goes to her death with pride and honour. The scene in which she must hide her pregnancy and is gulled into revealing it by guzzling apricots was convincing; the gentle merriness of her love with Antonio as they gambol on her bed was touching ("Were we ever so merry?" she asks); at the other end of the spectrum, her death scene was one of the most brutal and powerful things I have seen in recent theatre, her struggles extended but never comical. The calm serenity of her affirmation of identity when she lies imprisoned: "I am Duchess of Malfi still" was underlain with something powerful and scared at the same time.

Equally brilliant was the malcontent intelligencer Bosola, whose complex relationship with the audience, as he goes from rough murderer to avenger, was teased out perfectly by Mark Bonnar: weathered soldier to disillusioned, howling Fury.

Corruption and rankness seep through the play: standing pools, poisoned fountains and rotting flesh are constant motifs: "Thou art a box of worm seed at best, but a salvatory of green mummy", says Bosola to the Duchess; Bosola, his vengeane perfect at the end, says "We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves / That, ruin'd, yields no echo." The court where the  Duchess of Malfi operates is rank - like Hamlet's Elsinore - a place where gossip and cunning run riot. People hide behind arrases; reputation is all (and nothing). The stage set was a large, cloistered structure, which functioned both as an area where anyone could stand and overhear anyone else, and also shifted (sometimes spectacularly) from public to private space, from court to bedroom, showing how though one may try to shore up those barriers, they are in reality nothing more than gossamer.

Candles lit the gloom, and light and sound was used cleverly: when the Duchess first appears (after Antonio, her beloved, claims that she stains time past, and lights the time to come) she arrived in a blaze of whiteness; when the adulterous Julia is discovered with the Cardinal, the entire stage set dripped with crimson. There is a scene in which Antonio, bent on reconciliation with the brothers, hears an echo. Snow falls, he is wrapped in a cloak: what might have been overly doom-laden was rendered supremely plangent by the fact that the echo sounded like the dead Duchess' voice.

The production also brought out the animality of the play - although it cut my favourite line ("abortive hedgehog") it still bristles with wolves and tigers (and dormice), even entering the plot in the form of Ferdinand's lycanthropy (which, I noticed, is foreshadowed when he tells Bosola that wolves will dig up the Duchess' corpse.) Ferdinand's insanity also dripped throughout the rest of the play - was anyone really sane? Cariola, the Duchess' maid, questions her sanity; when the Duchess is imprisoned, her brother Ferdinand sends madmen to howl outside her windows.

One of the most famous scenes in the play is when the bodies of Antonio and her son are revealed to the Duchess; she is not told that they are only wax representations. It's both a clever commentary on acting - we are taken in, as the Duchess is - and here it was also a suggestive catalyst of fear: the bodies appeared swinging from nooses, reminding me of the messenger speech in Oedipus Rex describing Jocasta's hanging; that slight movement all the more effective.

The cast operated sometimes in masque-like fashion, with static figures; othertimes with stylised, courtly movement, but always with grace and fluidity. The action was quick; the first half like a lit fuse; the second half was like the resonating explosion. A superlative production which slices out the beating heart of the play: the dying Antonio calls for his son to leave courtly life; but after he dies, and the brothers and Bosola die with him, it is his son who is brought in to take on the princely mantel. To enter the machine again. We can only hope that he will be able to purge something from the air.

The Duchess of Malfi shows Webster to be just as interesting a playwright as Shakespeare (though why does nobody ever question that a cartwright's son was able to write about the goings on at a distant court in Italy? Just a thought.) Though the court is rank and enseamed, the Duchess does manage to die a good death - a Christian death. Sanity is possible, and so is goodness.

The Adolescent Fever Dream of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford

Incest is best

There's nothing like a Jacobean tragedy for lust, incest, and hearts on sticks. Especially the latter. Cheek by Jowl's flabbergasting production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is an uber-tragedy, a slick, serpentine nightmare-machine where everything happens at a thousand miles an hour and under manic, bright strobeing lights. This is what would happen if you boiled tragedy down to its purest essence. It's what the witches make in their cauldrons in Macbeth.

The text has been sliced down to its bare bones - there is no bumptious suitor subplot here. Everything is focused on the affair between Annabella and her brother Giovanni. The stage represents many places at many times, but is always Annabella's bedroom, giving the impression that the whole thing is a sordid adolescent fever-dream draped in posters of True Blood.

Lydia Wilson's Annabella goes from sweet, ipod-bouncing ingenue through lustful demoness to final repentance with ease and poise, her presence always  balanced, and never, though she is often physically thrown about the stage, out of control - until, crucially, at the end. Her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon) has a fanaticism to his lust, convincing himself with philosophies and books that he is right, even in his most psychopathic moments. He strides around in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, recalling Ben Whishaw in Hamlet; the character himself like a depraved, cut-price version of that delaying prince in his more vengeful moments.

The rest of the cast fit seamlessly into the nightmare. There is Soranzo (Jack Hawkins), seemingly a man of good reputation, but in reality as corrupt and whimpering as anyone else. Putana (Lizzie Hopley) wins out as Annabella's conniving maid, playing her with all the world-weariness of an East End gangster's moll. No matter, says she, if a girl gets the fit upon her then father or brother - it's all one.

Characters remain on stage even when they are not there, or even when dead, acting as a weird kind of chorus, a set of Eumenides, sometimes in suits, sometimes barechested, dark ghostlings of a disturbed mind. The simple set has two doors - one that opens into freedom; and one that enters into a white tiled bathroom. If you go into that bathroom, you're not going to come out of it happy. Or even alive. This was perhaps the most effective thing about the production - that the goriest moments happened in that clinical room, thus heightening their power. There were some fine touches, as when Soranzo, trying to reconcile Annabella after he's found out she's pregnant with another's child, buys her baby clothes; or when a leather-clad man arrives suddenly to seduce the nurse Putana into giving away who the father is.

The play eschewed the final lines of Ford's text, which provide the title: "We shall have time / To talk at large of all; but never yet / Incest and murder have so strangely met. Of one so young, so rich in nature's store, / Who could not say, 'tis pity she's a whore?" In a production such as this, the rhymes would have been jangly; the nervous audience would have guffawed. Instead, we were left with Giovanni, spattered with his sister's blood, holding her heart in his hands as her ghost reaches towards him.

Whether manically dancing, or stylised into heaving piles of flesh that resembled paintings ('The Wreck of the Medusa" at one point; the Sacred Heart at another) the cast gave their all to it. This production was full of apocalyptic energy, of a decadent entropy that pulled everything out away from the centre, out of control, into chaos. We are lucky that we can turn the lights on, and escape from that crimson-tinged bedroom. We can flee the nightmare-machine - but only just.

The Booker Prize Shortlist: Are the judges out to get me?

Sophocles: Should be a Booker Judge

I think the Booker Prize judges are out to get me. Some of you may remember that I threatened to leave the country if A D Miller's Snowdrops got on the short list. I have no beef with A D Miller. I am sure that he is a very nice man, and I am sure that his novel will be enjoyed by many who like that sort of thing. But whether it deserves to be on the shortlist of what is meant to be the best novels of the year is another matter entirely. I have long since ceased to feel angry about the list. What's the point, after all? Perhaps it all comes down to taste, in the end, and who can argue about taste?

But the problem is, it isn't just about taste. There are objective criteria which can be applied to books to judge their quality. And it doesn't seem as if the judges have applied any criteria at all to this list, other than their own taste. In the Athenian festivals of tragedy, you wouldn't put up a satyr play on the same level as Sophocles. But that is effectively what these judges are doing. One can bang on and on about who the judges are – but I don't think that necessarily matters. It just seems as if they are trying to make some sort of statement about the state of books. But whatever it is, it's rather confused.

It makes the Booker (sorry, the Man Booker, as we are bound to call it) look silly. How can it be taken seriously as an internationally renowned literary prize when it allows a paper-thin thriller on? Where is the richness, the nuance? Giles Coren has written a piece about Julian Barnes in The Times, suggesting that Barnes is too good to win the Booker Prize. And sadly, it looks like he's right.

Perhaps the only way to succeed now is to write dross. Perhaps we are entering a world where 'content' is all, where style, substance and meaning come second to immediacy and thrills. Perhaps the Booker Prize next year will see "Shit My Dad Says 2" and the Beano Annual on it. After all, they're both entertaining, aren't they? And that's all that matters, to be entertained.

So I shall be leaving the country. I'll be going back to the past. If you need me I'll be with Sophocles.

An edited version of this piece appears on The Periscope Post

Read my review of A D Miller's Snowdrops for The Daily Telegraph here