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Gloriously gory Jacobean tragedy at Stratford
The Royal Shakespeare Company opens the new Stratford-upon-Avon season, and celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Swan Theatre, with a vigorous and virtually uncut revival " the company's first " of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy The White Devil.
So effective was the accumulation of poisonings, stabbings, shootings, and garrottings at Thursday's matinee that a schoolgirl on the front banquette of the warm, wooden quasi-Elizabethan interior, fainted during the last act, banged her head on the front of the apron stage and revived a few minutes later only to see that the carnage was still in full flow.
While Edward Bond's rewrite of the piece 20 years ago pointed up the heartlessness in the machinations of the corrupt Italian court by draining the action of passion, Gale Edwards's production goes for the real gung-ho goriness. The stage steams with lust. Bodices are unlaced, bodkins bared and cod-pieces set a-quivering.
The sneering, salivating Flamineo of Richard McCabe, pimping for his married sister, Vittoria Corombona, fixes her illicit liaison with Ray Fearon's swaggering Duke Brachiano; the poor fellow ends up in a poisoned helmet, sweating blood like coagulated maggots and burning nearly to death before his neck's broken.
Webster's wonderful, hermetic world of vice, metaphor and chain reaction, unimpeded by subplots, takes us to the heart of darkness and corruption. Jane Gurnett as Vittoria finds a source of wisdom and resignation in the vengeful consequences to her reasonable itch (she is married to a foolish dullard), while Flamineo is revealed as a cut-throat transformed by experience, and an impressive Philip Quast leads a perverse mission of mercy as the devoted Lodovico.
The Swan was founded to explore the repertoire, and to reassess, not reassert, masterpieces, but The White Devil is so rarely seen, and usually bowdlerised, that this production is fully vindicated.
© Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
