A saucy romp that’s become a harrumph
Women Beware Women (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe) Verdict: Feminists beware Thomas Middleton ★★✩✩✩ The Last Five Years (Southwark Playhouse, London) Verdict: Exhausting musical and emotional triathlon ★★★✩✩
Women Beware Women may not be the play they think it is down at Shakespeare’s Globe.
A Jacobean tragedy with a notoriously high body count, it’s a three-way catfight, with women doing what they must to get by in the dog- eat- dog courts of Renaissance Florence.
There is evidence in the programme, however, that the production team think it’s a feminist tract.
That takes some working out and does nothing to help the intelligibility or enjoyability of the play.
Undeterred, Amy Hodge’s eightiesset production is determined to present the story as an allegory of how frightful men are to women by making them live under patriarchy.
Well, that was the deal in the 17th century, and no one’s suggesting we go back. But where Thomas middleton’s characters take pleasure in their plights, Hodge presents a stiff little cautionary tale inspired by today’s woke-eyed evangelists.
The first consequence of this is that half the men are ham-acted by women. This may provide equal job opportunities, but only at the cost of cooling the heat of the play’s blistering sex war.
THe
second consequence is that the play’s three resourceful and independent women have had their talons trimmed.
Free spirit Bianca (Thalissa Teixeira), who elopes with her boyfriend, is a sullen prig instead of a sexually enterprising opportunist who dumps her jealous young lover for the rich old Duke.
And olivia Vinall as the bright young Isabella, who’s tricked by her aunt into marrying her uncle (it really is grisly), is presented as a wounded bird rather than a sybaritic adventurer. By far the best turn is from husky Tara Fitzgerald who, deliciously, still sounds like she’s puffing 40-plus navy Cut a day.
Her Livia really doesn’t give a whatsit what anyone thinks, and drools indecently over the line: ‘Sin tastes, at the first draught, like wormwood water. But, drunk again, ’tis nectar ever after.’
A breathy cougar, she first manipulates the suggestible Isabella, then directs Bianca’s lovelorn young buck into her boudoir. This kind of squalid behaviour should beat the pants off any righteously censorious interpretation every night of the week.
The audience needs only a little clarity to enjoy the convoluted, disreputable plot, where even the Cardinal warns that ‘time spent in goodness is tedious’.
But, as if it weren’t enough for us to be set on the rack of the Globe’s notorious benches, we are offered only further chastisement by school-girlish staging.
■ THe Last Five Years is an early musical from 2002 by new York composer Jason Robert Brown, who’s best known for his musical of the book The Bridges of madison County.
This, though, was inspired by his failed first marriage. It tells the man’s story forward in time and the woman’s in reverse — crossing in the middle for their engagement and wedding. Despite the fact Brown and his ex-wife sued and countersued each other over the show, the big problem is that the characters are wishy-washy. All we know of him is that he’s a writer who feels trapped in his Jewish heritage, and of her that she’s a struggling musical theatre actress who (according to him, m’lud) is unreasonable and jealous of his success. Brown’s music is stormily impressive. It’s been described as a mix of Billy Joel and Rodgers and Hammerstein — cheerfully kitsch and lavishly lush. And the two actors have to compete with a no less vociferous band of violin, cello, guitar and keyboards. But in Jonathan o’Boyle’s production, molly Lynch and oli Higginson are equal to the task of what can feel like an exhausting musical and emotional triathlon.