Eoin Price

Macbeth presented by The Young Vic, Birmingham Repertory Theatre (review)

prosperity, fertility, and envy. The door of Caius’s house was green, as was its back wall. Upon arriving home, he sought a green box in his closet (1.4.39–40). The disguised Anne Page, with whom he was to run away, was also in green, and he carried the same green box when he protested that he had married a boy. When Ford examined the buck basket for the second time, he threw malodorous laundry into the air. Caius caught a pair of Mistress Ford’s unmentionables and walked off stage caressing them. He, too, was smitten with her—but he was a voyeur of life, limited to jotting empirical notes in his little black notebook. Departing from Shakespeare’s text, in which Ford closes the play, Monte created a poignant ending that followed Ford’s final line by revealing a different side of Falstaff. As each reconciled couple exited the stage, Falstaff gently applauded them whilst looking longingly at them. As the last couple departed, he clapped and then blew them a silent kiss. It was a very sad moment. Falstaff ’s transformation from Lothario to reformed and lonely human was palpable. He quietly came downstage to retrieve his antlers. As he paused there, first Robin and then the Host of the Garter Inn came forward to take his arms and the trio exited in hope and friendship.

Review of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (directed by Dominic Dromgoole for Shakespeare's Globe) at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, 21 January 2015

After a varied opening season including a stereotypically Jacobean tragedy (The Duchess of Malfi), a heavily metatheatrical comedy (The Knight of the Burning Pestle), and a satiric tragicomedy played by a company of children (The Malcontent), the Globe offered a narrower tonal and generic range for their second season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Knight of the Burning Pestle was revived, but the new plays – ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Broken Heart, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and The Changeling – were all tragedies. Does the preponderance of tragedies suggest that the Globe imagine the smaller space of the indoor theatre to be better suited to tragedy, thereby allowing for greater intimacy, tension and intrigue? Not necessarily, given that the 2015/16 season will feature four of Shakespeare’s late career plays, but a popular association with decadent, indoor, candlelit theatres and dark, tumultuous tragedy remains. Even so, tragic productions at the SamWanamaker Playhouse have often demonstrated a flair for the comic and The Changeling was no exception. At its best, this suspicion of generic boundaries was interestingly unsettling; at its worst, it was crassly upsetting. The Changeling offers the challenge of dual plots: one, broadly tragic, set largely in a castle and ending with multiple deaths; the other more like a city comedy, but set in an asylum and resulting in gulling, shaming and ultimately reconciliation. Yet the production pursued laughs in the main plot by taking advantage of the labyrinthine asides employed by both Beatrice-Joanna (Hattie Morahan) and De Flores (Trystan Gravelle). De Flores was especially effective in gaining the audience’s interest and sympathy with a comically well-timed aside. This De Flores was charismatic and nearunflappable; Gravelle’s performance emphasised the funniness of his initial misunderstanding with Beatrice-Joanna. And yet, while De Flores is undeniably devious, Gravelle showed comparatively little of the character’s vulnerability. De Flores confides in the audience and reveals to us that he has been dejected into servitude; he also remarks how his physical formmeans he is regularly shunned. Gravelle’s De Flores wore some makeup to suggest the marks on his face, but his acting conveyed little anger or shame. This coolly calculating De Flores seemed to be on top right from the very beginning. Sometimes, this worked very well: De Flores had the deadly composure and emotional indifference of a psychopath and was, on occasions, peculiarly chilling. Perhaps the best example of this was the scene in which he killed the amusingly vacuous Alonzo (Tom Stuart). Alonzo did not die easily and attempted, several times, to escape, even as he was wounded, but after a bloody struggle De Flores prevailed before turning, with an insouciant shrug, to talk again with the audience. Here, Gravelle embodied some of the contraries fundamental to De Flores: he mixed frenzied anger with cool, quick-thinking composure. Unfortunately, he did not manage to sustain this kind of complexity: the laughter he provoked too often obscured the horror of his actions. There was no ethical tipping point to speak of: it is true that De Flores committed a sequence of terrible actions, but he remained an essentially funny, roguish figure throughout. The largely humorous treatment of his relationship with Beatrice-Joanna kept its deep-rooted complexities at arm’s length.

Review of Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton (directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 7 November 2014

In their Roaring Girls season, the RSC produced a series of plays, directed by women, in which female characters feature prominently. Polly Findlay’s production of Arden of Faversham, Jo Davies’ production of The Roaring Girl and Maria Aberg’s production of The White Devil were complemented by Midsummer Mischief, a series of performances responding to the Roaring Girls season but staged at the newly reopened Other Place under the direction of Erica Whyman. The Witch of Edmonton, a curious domestic drama written by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford, was, ostensibly, a good choice to end the season, but it is perhaps unfortunate, given how the season’s other shows had been directed by women, that the closing play was directed by a man, even if that man happens to be the company’s Artistic Director. I wonder, too, if the RSC might have given some attention to a female playwright from the period. Nevertheless, the faith Doran places in the commercial and artistic viability of Renaissance plays is admirable and this reviewer was certainly grateful for the chance to see The Witch of Edmonton. Sadly, Doran’s enthusiasm for the play was not shared by many of the nation’s prominent theatre critics. Most reviewers praised the production, but denigrated the play. In The Guardian, Michael Billington acknowledged the “sombre beauty of Gregory Doran’s production” and the “brooding presence of Eileen Atkins as the titular witch”, but doubted “the quality of the play itself”. In The Observer, Kate Kellaway found more to like, but also suggested that “too many playwrights spoil the plot” and that the dramatists “seem not to have agreed on whether they were writing a comedy or a tragedy”. Watching Doran’s characteristically competent but comparatively unadventurous production, I am tempted to say just the opposite: this is a very fine play – partly because of the tonal shifts which Kellaway found confusing – which was not especially well served by the production; moments of excellence were achieved, but this was largely because of, rather than in spite of, the quality of the play. The play’s most powerful moments were achieved by the combination of strong acting and excellent writing. For example, when Old Carter (Ian Redford) learned of the death of his daughter Susan (Faye Castelow) and tried to make sense of her dead, silent body, Redford spoke the lines “When I speak I look to be spoken to! / Forgetful slut!” (3.3.108–09) with tremendous anger. Perhaps Carter invoked the misogynistic rhetoric

Review of Arden of Faversham (directed by Polly Findlay for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 11 August 2014

In his review for The Guardian, Michael Billington described Arden of Faversham, revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at the Swan Theatre as part of the “Roaring Girls” season of plays about women, as reeking of “documentary realism”. For Billington, Polly Findlay’s production was never likely to be successful because, in taking the play out of its original context, it failed to make sense of the play’s sixteenthcentury politics. Terry Hands’ 2010 Theatre Clwyd production has shown that the play can work perfectly well by gesturing towards an Elizabethan context, but Billington’s objection to modernisation seems curiously misjudged. The play ought to be seen, according to Billington, as “a fascinating historical document”; this would be a shame, though, as it does a disservice to a play which, in its tonal variation, can startle, amuse and disturb. Indeed, although the play is based on a real-life murder and was documented, alongside stories of kings and statecraft, in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, documentary realism does not seem to be high on its agenda. A large section of the play is dedicated to the brilliant comic double act of Shakebag and Black Will, two villains hired to murder Arden, but who continually and spectacularly fail to do so. In one scene they pursue Arden across a misty marsh: Shakebag ends up falling into a ditch. This is not quite documentary realism, even if it is drawing upon historical accounts. It is also worth remembering that the events the play depicts are not, in fact, directly contemporaneous (unlike those in Thomas Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy, for example), but rather occurred in 1551, some 40 years before the play was written. In short: it is perfectly reasonable for the RSC to offer a modernised version of the play. It might even be that some of the precise political resonances of Arden would not transmit all that well to a modern audience unfamiliar with the rhetoric of sixteenth-century domestic politics; when the play is modernised, this becomes less of an issue. Nonetheless, any performance decision, whether the result of modernisation or not, is going to have an effect on the way the play works. Findlay’s production made several notable interventions, not all of which are as easily defensible. Chief among these was the decision to emphasise the comedy. For sure, Arden is a very funny play and the assassination attempts, orchestrated by Black Will (Jay Simpson) and Shakebag (Tony Jayawardena) were, for the most part, brilliantly funny. In one such scene, the pair spent an inordinate amount of time trying to assemble a long-range rifle, allowing Arden to pass by unscathed. The play’s combination of bungled murder and snowfall brought to mind

Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660

The epilogue investigates the rapidly changing uses of the term ‘private’ in the period immediately before, during, and after the closure of the theatres in 1642. Since ‘public’ entertainments were officially banned, drama had to become ‘private’ in order to survive. This privacy was bifurcated: on the one hand, ‘private’ referred to household performances, as it had done in the sixteenth century; on the other, it also referred to illegal, unlicensed performances at commercial theatres. The ‘public/private’ theatre division which emerged in the early seventeenth century made less sense in the changing culture of the English Republic and the new indoor theatres erected in the early Restoration, which rendered the older outdoor and indoor venues obsolete, also served to confine the terms to theatre history.

‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640

Chapter 3 charts the increased frequency with which the term ‘private’ became associated with the indoor theatres of Caroline London. It then examines a number of examples which appear to resist the standard ‘public/private’ division by referring to indoor playhouse performance as ‘public’. Some of these examples have been misread by critics and seem more likely to uphold, rather than contest, the established distinction, but those examples which do challenge the ‘public/private’ dichotomy deserve greater attention. Some critics have claimed that such examples suggest the inconsistency and irrelevance of the terms, but this chapter argues precisely the opposite. Through close analysis of three Thomas Heywood playbook title pages, the chapter posits that Heywood critiqued politicised ‘public/private’ boundaries.

The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625

Chapter 2 examines in detail the arguments advanced by theatre historians to explain why early seventeenth-century indoor playhouses were described as ‘private’. It exposes unsupportable claims that the term was used to circumvent censorship: in fact, the plays bearing ‘private’ on their title pages were censored by the Master of the Revels. The chapter demonstrates that the term had a much wider range of meanings than theatre historians have acknowledged. It resists generalised claims and instead charts the various ways in which both ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used throughout the Jacobean period, thereby attesting to their significance and complexity. In doing this, it considers title page advertisements and offers new ways of thinking about how playbooks and theatre spaces were marketed.

‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600

Chapter 1 debunks one of the standard scholarly assumptions about the indoor playhouses: that they were described as ‘private’ in the sixteenth century. It shows that although ‘private’ might be used to refer to domestic performances and academic drama, it was not used in relation to the first set of Elizabethan indoor theatres. Instead, the chapter advances a more complex argument which accounts for the varying ways in which ‘public’ and ‘common’ were applied to sixteenth-century commercial playhouses. In doing so, it contextualises the early seventeenth-century emergence of the term ‘private’ in the discourse of commercial theatre. For the second set of indoor companies, the term appeared an attractive way of differentiating themselves from the ‘public’ playhouses.