Injecting new blood into Webster’s revenge tragedy
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh The Duchess [of Malfi]
Zinnie Harris, author of This Restless House (an electrifying adaptation of Aeschylus’s
Oresteia), has established herself as one of Scotland’s finest tragedians. It is a reputation that can only be enhanced by this excoriating adaptation of John Webster’s gory revenge tragedy, The
Duchess of Malfi, of which she is both writer and director.
Harris transposes Webster’s five-act play, first staged in the early 17th century, into a modern-dress drama. From the outset, when Kirsty Stuart’s widowed Duchess (pictured below, with Adam Best) dismisses the outrageous demands of her two avaricious brothers (who, mindful of their inheritance, insist on their sister’s chastity), the production brings the misogyny in the play to the fore.
Stuart’s tremendously 21st-century Duchess is deliciously relieved at the death of her “boring” husband and grasps her newfound freedom with both hands. With the assistance of her loyal lady-in-waiting Cariola (the excellent Fletcher Mathers), she is determined to seize her chance of happiness with her beloved steward Antonio (the appropriately uncertain and besotted Graham Mackay-bruce).
Her leap into modern womanhood is in direct conflict with a brutal male chauvinism. Her siblings, the hypercynical Cardinal (George Costigan on chillingly nonchalant form) and madman Ferdinand (Angus Miller with terrifying shades of Dennis Hopper), open the gates of Hell, accompanied by their hired killer Bosola (a callous, yet conflicted Best).
There is a crystalline brilliance in Harris’s combination of Renaissance and the modern, enhanced by Tom Piper’s stark set (slabs of concrete supporting a metal gantry). In the savage final act, with the help of Jamie Macdonald’s remarkable and horrifying video projections, it becomes an appallingly topical torture chamber.
Harris’s text is impressive in its poetry and rhythm, even if the latter is occasionally and needlessly interrupted. The cinematic flashing of characters’ names on the wall is egregious, as is the projection of the play’s final two words. Oğuz Kaplangi’s score is atmospheric and intelligently diverse, although some of the set piece songs are more effective than others. Ultimately, however, the production’s few shortcomings are dwarfed by its many achievements. Harris has another superb tragedy on her hands.