RCS, 27/01/2016

John Ford : 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Directed by Gareth Nicholls

If you think the "everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink" type of drama is entirely the product of daytime television and the long-running soap opera, think again.  English Renaissance theatre was at it much more convincingly five hundred years ago, and Shakespeare is on the mild end of the scale.  When you see the works of such authors as Beaumont & Fletcher, Massinger, Webster or Ford, the subtlety of the Bard takes on a new significance, but there's a visceral burn to these Jacobean dramas that, when produced with appropriate conviction, has its own appeal, and which has ensured the pertinacity of these works, no matter how extravagant, even outrageous, their subject matter may appear.

In the early 80s, the Citizens' Theatre produced a string of these types of plays, staged with a bloody (and I use the adjective advisedly) intensity that left an indelible impression.  By comparison, I have to say that Garth Nicholls' staging of this celebrated example for these Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students (I think I heard it said that this was a 2nd Year show, but haven't found any confirmation) was positively discreet, without much gore until the very end.  Exigencies of casting also gave us a gender-switched Florio, here Lady Florio, mother rather than father, which worked reasonably well.  We were in the studio theatre, a small, enclosed space, the stage laid out in the centre with seating to either side, and the production was accordingly stripped down to basics and in modern dress, none of which shocked in any way.  The only thing that looked a trifle out of place were the swords at the end, but it was nice to see some well-planned stage fighting quite close up; there was a real clash to the swords that made it credible.

As is not uncommon, all of the sub-plot, with Richardetto, Grimaldi, Philotis et al was entirely stripped out of this production, concentrating the drama on the central trio of Giovanni, Annabella and Soranzo.  The one thing you do lose with that excision is the message that the blind pursuit of vengeance is both futile and counter-productive.  On the other hand, it does focus on Ford's unrepentant conviction that love is its own justification - at no point do either of the incestuous siblings regret their relationship, and where the sanguinary conclusions of other Jacobean tragedies usually carry strong overtones of just desserts and moral outcomes, there's nothing of the sort here.  The deaths of Annabella and Giovanni are a release from their impossible love and lives.

Grace Boyle was Annabella, clear and determined, with a quiet smoulder of resentment in her, and a good quality of backbone.  I generally liked Tom England's Soranzo - a spoiled pretty-boy in one way, but a perhaps also a character seeking his footing in a situation that has abruptly escaped his control, and anything he recognises as normality.  I wasn't certain whether his feeling for Annabella was real or not; given his relations with Hippolyta, this is always up for interpretation, but neither actor nor director made it very clear one way or another, and I would have preferred some clarification.  Tanwyn Smith-Meek was a solid Vasques, bluntly forthright, and Sinead Sharkey a lively Putana, the archetypal nurse-panderess one finds so often in period drama of this type.

Bernardo Castillo Jorge played Giovanni, and he could have done with more arrogance.  For all that he's not an aristocrat, Giovanni is a young man with every advantage, money, looks, intelligence, all of which make him obstinately and catastrophically single-minded. This was not as apparent as it should have been.  Also, Castillo Jorge is audibly not a native English speaker, and while for most of the play this was not an issue, I think at the end he was maybe getting a bit tired, and the passages in his final scene with Annabella, which contain some of his best lines, were a little blurred.

In the main, though, this was good theatre, well-handled, direct and cleanly delivered, and for all the extravagance of the characters and the improbability of their situation, Ford's language has lost none of its grace and persuasion.

[Next : 28th January]