‘Tis Pity She's a Whore

It was never going to end well. From the opening scene of John Ford’s seventeenth century tragedy, when love-struck Giovanni reveals to his tutor that the object of his youthful passion is his sister Annabella – a young lady currently being courted by a small platoon of Parma’s most eligible suitors – the stage is set for an evening of incest, murder and madness: the body count will not be negligible.

On this occasion the modern-style staging of ever-innovative theatre company Cheek by Jowl means we also get electronic music, drug-taking and various degrees of mild nudity played out against the intimate and innocent backdrop of a teenager’s bedroom. The result is a stylish, gripping and thoughtfully put together production, working from a trimmed-down text which gives coherence to the madness unfolding on stage. The more focussed plot neatly skirts the revenge tragedy trap of descending into a comedy bloodbath, in spite of a fair portion of eye-watering violence and the odd ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ demise. This isn’t to say that the production isn’t funny; from the outset the company use dance, physical comedy and clever manipulation of Ford’s text to heighten tension, keep the action moving, and to produce a lot of laughs. It’s both light-hearted and stomach-churning, and fast-paced enough that they more than get away with the decision to forego the interval.

The cast work wonderfully well together. Jack Gordon is convincing as the increasingly bonkers puppy dog Giovanni, and Laurence Spellman does a grand turn as the borderline psychopathic servant Vasques, but the really interesting characters in this claustrophobic domestic setting are the women: conflicted ingénue Annabella, her morally blind confidante Putana, and Hippolita, the spurned lover of Annabella’s suitor Soranzo.

Annabella is beautifully played by Lydia Wilson as a luminous Skins-meets-Nabokov child-woman (Wardrobe got it spot-on), keeping sweets under the bed and cheeking her elders; exploring a nascent sexuality with understandable confusion. Lizzie Hopley’s Putana is a vicarious fantasist, seeking sensation by encouraging her young charge in a dangerous course of action, while Suzanne Burden steals the show as an enraged Hippolita, cut to the core to have compromised herself only to be passed over for a younger woman.

The whole production is intelligently crafted and delivered – you can see the thought that has gone into the staging, from the posters on Annabella’s bedroom wall to the dazzlingly white en suite bathroom, and in the way the whole company moves together as chorus and audience to the ongoing action, never allowing the story to drag. A great performance, extremely watchable, thoughtful, gory, and somehow quite uplifting; a whole raft of comeuppance-getting still doesn’t offer a terribly coherent moral message – but we can probably draw our own conclusions about the wisdom of intra-family relations.

Susie Cogan (DI Staff), 08/02/12

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