Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford (seen November 12)

Performed in the stunningly atmospheric Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, this Jacobean pay is superbly well done.

The Playhouse is candle-lit and decorated in 17th-century style; the production has responded to this with costumes which give both a contemporary and a period feel – elaborate white ruffs; long dresses for the women; but printed silk shirts (often only casually buttoned) for the men. Giovanni, the outcast, is in some ways the most modern looking despite his ruff: he is wearing spotlessly white trainers, which led me to notice that some of the other young males have conventional black leather shoes. The visual impact, though rather odd, works.

The play contrasts the apparent ‘innocent’ sensuality of the central incestuous relationship with the mercenary and hypocritical society in which the siblings live. But the sensuality is not, after all, innocent though it is undoubtedly exhilarating, not to say intoxicating, to begin with. As the action unfolds, compromises and betrayals infect it as Annabella is forced into marriage to ‘account for’ her pregnancy, or at least to save her ‘honour’ in the eyes of her society. This looks plausible until we see the violent anger her husband feels when he discovers how he has been used; he spits at her and drags her by her hair across the stage, which makes for uncomfortable viewing (some distressed cries from the audience at the spitting) – but then his anger covers a real shame, and his pain at having his own love so traduced leads even Annabella to pity him.

The social world around the siblings is awash with plots of revenge and betrayal; so many people want Soranzo (Annabella’s husband) dead for so many different reasons that it is amazing he survives so long – though with a servant like Vasquez looking out for him, he eludes trouble until the final showdown. Vasquez appears to be the corruptible servant, but is alarmingly revealed to be following his own notions of honour and loyalty, to quite brutal effect; he is pleased at the end to be a Spaniard who has outdone Italians in vengeance.

The play begins in an atmosphere of almost comedy as the lovers (pace their sibling relationship) being full of youthful ardour and beauty, the older folk doting or mercenary, the rival suitors wild, passionate or just plain stupid. Bergetto in particular raises laughs through being the classic twittish aristocrat with an indulgent but wiser servant, and his bloody demise in a stabbing of mistaken identity is all the more poignant in that the audience is jolted from treating him as a farcical distraction to realising that a violent death for him is as disastrous as it would be for anyone.

The final scene is extremely bloody; Giovanni’s red shirt and red trousers seem almost colourless when he arrives brandishing his sister’s heart on his dagger, his whole front drenched with her blood and his mind lost to vengeful madness. He and Soranzo expire even more bloodily on the stage, their respective pools of blood needing to be mopped up before the cathartic dance and curtain call could proceed. In fact the other two deaths by knife-thrust (Bergetto’s and Annabella’s) were also accompanied by generous quantities of stage blood, though the former was conducted in darkness and was only revealed when some with lanterns responded to the cries for help uttered by his pitiful betrothed.

Though all of this could have seemed over-exaggerated, it was not. The intensity of the action and the bravura verse speaking, together with the extraordinary intimacy of the theatre space in its candlelight, meant that bloody and protractedly convulsing deaths were entirely of a piece with the production as  whole, balancing the extremity of the emotions both amatory and vengeful on display throughout.

The cast was uniformly excellent.

Much is made of the alienating effect of the incest motif, which makes the central love relationship hard to sympathise with. Of course it is true that the audience cannot engage with ready sympathy (as they presumably do with, for example, Romeo and Juliet); Giovanni’s self-justifications, which look clever and sophisticated at first, soon pall as they become more sophistical and self-serving, while Annabella is led to renounce the situation after an extraordinary reproof from the Friar opens her eyes to the likelihood of hellfire as a consequence of non-repentance. But the machinations around the central couple are not an attractive alternative by any means; once the buffoonish Bergetto is dispatched everything becomes even more distasteful, with a rapacious and fundamentally unjust Cardinal thrown in for good measure. Vasquez sees his actions as noble but we have watched him double-deal nd betray the trust of two women to their deaths (both quite horrible) and though he professes grief at his master’s death he is a dangerous and ultimately uncontrollable force to be reckoned with.

The truth is that no situation in the play is either wholly admirable or wholly despicable, though individual acts can easily enough be placed so. This moral ambivalence is perhaps matched by the uncanny shifts of tone, whereby we as audience seem at times to be laughing at a social comedy, only to be appalled at some grotesque example of physical or moral brutality at the next. To have kept and exploited these shifts so powerfully is a sure sign of a great production.