Trafalgar Theatre, London – until 20th December 2024
Reviewed by Celia Armand Smith
4****
Writer and director Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi is a sorry tale of love, revenge, and ultimately men being really awful. The story of a woman being controlled by aggressive and controlling male relatives is unfortunately as relevant today as it was in 1614, and Harris’s modernisation shows just that. The wealthy Duchess (Jodie Whittaker) is trapped in a hyper-traditional cycle of marriage and mourning prescribed by her horrible brothers, The Cardinal (Paul Ready), and her twisted twin Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne). Both are brutal in their words and actions, and they will stop at nothing to find out what their headstrong sister has been doing. When she decides to marry her steward Antonio (Joel Fry) in secret, she sets off a series of worsening events that leads to madness and murder.
First performed in 2019, Harris’s updated version could be set at any point between 1950 and 2050. Tom Piper’s pale grey brutalist style set is simple with a walkway running along the top that allows for events to be manipulated and people to be spied on. This industrial-esque setting which is oft seen in modern retellings of classics feels strange and disconnected for a palace setting. There is an intense use of sound, light, and projection that bounce off the walls during a torture scene that is a difficult watch if only for the lights and sounds repeatedly turning on and off for what seems like a very long time. What follows is a series of extremely grisly deaths, and then a slightly confusing yet welcome calm choreographed afterlife accompanied by The Musician who may also be an angel or maybe Death.
Where the writing falters, the cast fill in the gaps. Jodie Whittaker is kind and defiant in her role of the Duchess and her love for her servant, and Joel Fry is perfect in his role of the at times charming yet wimpy Antonio. Paul Ready and Rory Fleck Byrne are splendidly evil (although at times comically so), and you can’t wait for their predictable demise. Jude Owusu as Bosola navigates his path with emotion and there are even some flecks of sympathy left for him at the end despite his heinous actions. Elizabeth Ayodele’s Julia is just a play thing for The Cardinal, and she has a lovely voice and bursts into song at one point, though I am not entirely sure why.
The tension between ambition and moral decay is palpable and there are lots of good ideas to be had in The Duchess (of Malfi), and yet this Tarantino adjacent retelling of a classic feels a bit bogged down by them. Despite this, I enjoyed the fantastic performances by the cast, and it’s always fun to see some proper bloody deaths on the London stage.