The last time I saw The White Devil in Oxford I was directing it myself. Precisely 42 years ago, Hilary term 1984, it was the first play ever to be put on in Merton Chapel, and it was bloody freezing. The poor audiences sat there for two and a half hours in numbing cold. They clapped at the end more to warm themselves up than out of any goodwill to the show. And we did it twice a night - at 7.30 and 10.30. People were leaving at 1am. Aye, we had it tough in them days. After the first night, the Domestic Bursar, Colonel Henderson (all bursars were called Colonel Henderson back then), hauled me into his office and berated me for having served hot mulled wine at the interval. ‘This is a house of God!’ he shouted. ‘Not a pub!’ Strangely, he didn’t seem to object to all the murders, fake blood and full-on simulated sex. I guess his issue was licencing, not licentiousness.
So yes. It wasn’t a great White Devil. But the queues went right out into Merton Street. And the reason people came was that they realised we were trying to bring this 400-year-old script to life. We understood the words. We relished twisting our tongues around Webster’s elaborate, lycanthropic language, and we saw the skull beneath his skin.
But never mind skulls and skins – sadly, this production at St John’s Garden Quad Auditorium barely scratches the epidermis of what makes Webster one of the most disturbing and deranged playwrights in English history. The actors recite the lines, but they don’t bring them to life. The warty, bestial language of Webster’s twisted imagination sounds bland as vanilla ice cream. Duke Brachiano’s vacillations between hatred and passion feel unexplained and senseless. Vittoria Corombona is more petulant than defiant. Her amoral brother Flamineo, mouthpiece for all Webster’s bile and hatred at ‘great men’, is rarely more than snarky. Only in Cardinal Monticelso’s ‘What’s a whore?’ tirade (performed by Ali Khan) does the true spirit of Webster, lyrical and distorted, come truly to the fore – and it is a genuinely powerful moment.
But that is unfortunately an exception. The White Devil demands a guiding vision to hold together its ferocity. Here, it feels as though the play has simply been mounted, rather than fuelled. Characters wander aimlessly around the stage while speaking. Odd, unexplained ideas appear and disappear without ever forming a coherent interpretation. For example, at one point, in a show clearly set in the distant past, a minor character instructs another to ‘watch this television’. Huh? Why the anachronism for this one, isolated instant? At another, a character is drowned while apple-dunking. In itself that’s not a bad idea, but if you haven’t got any water (and they don’t) then why choose a murder that requires that one specific thing? Instead, it just looks as though the victim, Camillo, is being killed by having his face squashed into some apples.
The directors have ignored the staging cues Webster knitted into his script, in favour of doing nothing instead. So, when Cornelia, the fretting mother of Vittoria and Flamineo, says, ‘I will join with thee, To the most woeful end e’er mother kneel’d’, the obvious implication is that both she and her daughter are kneeling. Not here. They just talk. Or when Brachiano and Vittoria meet for a secret assignation, and Flamineo, spying from the background, says, ‘His jewel for her jewel: well put in, duke’, and ‘That’s better: she must wear his jewel lower’, it’s clear that the two lovers are enjoying some sort of intimate encounter. It’s a case of ‘Some sex please, we’re Jacobean’. Here they are just sitting next to each other. To be clear, I don’t think everyone needs to interpret these cues the same way. But it would be nice to have something. Otherwise, it’s a very, very long three hours.
And on the subject of length, this White Devil is extraordinarily extended. Hell freezing over comes to mind. This is the first time I’ve ever come out of a play to find that my home, Magdalen College, has actually been locked up by the porters. But there is no need for this. Characters in this play take a notoriously long time to die, frequently reviving for one last cynical pop at the ruling classes. Directors Matthew Mair and Lara Machado could have made liberal cuts which would have rendered the experience more manageable for both cast and audience. Instead, this is page to stage, with no mediator.
But perhaps the most infuriating element of this show is not the fault of the production team at all, but of the auditorium itself. It’s the sound made by St John’s automated curtains, which are clearly in need of renovation. They were constantly being opened and closed, and every time they moved they made a horrible squeaking noise. It was like watching two teams of giant fieldmice having a tug-of-war. These curtains are vital. Surely a drop of WD40 is in order.
Undoubtedly Oxford students seem to feel more at ease with putting on modern plays than the classics. With certain notable exceptions (last year’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore for one) there’s a sense of awe and respect for these ancient works which freezes the creative juices like a rabbit in the Shakespearean headlights. But it doesn’t have to be like this. John Webster’s plays have been performed thousands of times in the most conventional of ways. If you can’t show them some disrespect whilst at university, when can you? It’s your job to annoy Colonel Henderson. Give him hell.
