The blood flows freely in this lucid and visceral Duchess
What’s black and white and red all over? Maria Aberg’s immensely lucid and visceral revival of The Duchess of Malfi. A tide of stage blood floods the Swan’s thrust stage as John Webster’s remorseless Jacobean tragedy of mightily abused femininity rises to its climax. Apparently 3,000 litres – approximately 40 bathtubs – of concocted gore will flow during the six-month run.
A case of “Eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino”, perhaps. And is there an inadvertent hint, too, of that eccentric TV gameshow, It’s a Knockout? The principal actors get soaked to the skin and risk breaking a leg as they slip and slide about.
Drawn from a real-life story of murder most foul, Webster’s anatomy of patriarchal control gone mad was never a subtle beast, but Aberg courts charges of letting loose a bull in a china shop: the blood seeps from a hoisted-up bull-like carcass. Can you succumb to Webster’s fecund poetry of the macabre, and the shadowy terror of the tale itself, with its dire punishment of its heroine (who dares remarry against her two brothers’ wishes), while the directorial conceit looms so large?
Well, I did. “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded which way please them,” snarls the savagely cynical henchman Bosola (a gruff and oikish Nicolas Tennant). Aberg’s OTT tactics dare you to snigger at the senseless spectacle, the mountains of violence arising from the molehills of possessive jealousy. Yet the sniggers die in the throat. Alexander Cobb, wonderfully febrile as the Duchess’s nemesis, her rabid twin brother Ferdinand, makes his final entrance bottom-shuffling in a mock horse-gallop: the effect is at once preposterous and piteously attuned to the way he has lost the plot, sunk by primal impulses he barely fathoms.
Deploying a cohort of all-brawn, little-brain male attendants, who perform ritualised workouts, this modern-dress interpretation allows us to draw pat (but timely) conclusions about the pernicious nature of maledominated societies. Chris New’s Cardinal, in preppy clothes, even openly, revoltingly, violates his mistress on a bed. The triumph is to suggest something intrinsically nightmarish at the kernel of human existence.
Superb as the Duchess, Joan Iyiola is first fierce, proud and stylish – coolly contemptuous of the misogynist “mansplaining” directed at her; that pride, that nobility, persists, but she’s reduced at one point to vocalising her torment in a haunting lament and is finally dragged about in the red mire by her hangmen like a ragdoll. “If a young girl comes to see The Duchess of Malfi … that’s going to be her lasting memory,” Iyiola observed in a recent interview. Press night coinciding with International Women’s Day, I ventured to take along my 13-year-old daughter. She loved it.