Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
by Thomas Middleton & William Rowley, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
June 15-September 23, 2017
Beatrice-Joanna: “Ever hung my fate, ‘mongst things corruptible”
Although The Changeling is one of the greatest Jacobean tragedies it has been staged only once before at the Stratford Festival in 1989 by the then-extant Young Company. Now the Festival is giving audiences another chance to see the play acted by fully-fledged actors and although the production is not perfect it is still worth seeing. Universal though we think Shakespeare is, his view of tragedy and dramatic structure were not the only ones found in the 17th century. The Changeling (1622) co-written by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), now considered second only to Shakespeare in the period, and William Rowley (c.1585-1626) is quite different from Shakespeare and in many ways more modern.
The play has the radical structure of alternating serious scenes set in a court in Spain with comic scenes set in a madhouse in the same area. Characters from the two settings do not interact until the very end, but the scenes in the madhouse show such a parallel to those at court that the play without saying so suggests that the court of supposedly sane people is not so very different from an asylum of supposedly mad people.
In both plots there is an older man in authority and a woman who owes allegiance to him as a wife or daughter, and there is a male servant who also is bound to him. Two men of rank seek the affection of the woman at the same time as the male servant who also seeks her affection. In the court scenes written by Middleton, Vermandero (David Collins) has arranged a marriage between his daughter Beatrice-Joanna (Mikaela Davies) and Alonzo de Piraquo (Qasim Khan). The problem is that another young nobleman, Alsemero (Cyrus Lane), has arrived at court and has fallen in love with Beatrice and she with him. Beatrice-Joanna has always been plagued by the attentions of her father’s ugly manservant De Flores (Ben Carlson). Now she thinks she can kill two birds with one stone by asking De Flores to murder Alonzo and then go into exile. Unfortunately, De Flores sees this as an opportunity to gain power over Beatrice.
A decision directors have to make is how much they wish to differentiate the play’s two settings. After all, despite the contrast of comedy and tragedy the madhouse and a corrupt court can appear equally unsettling. Maxwell using a unified set by Camellia Koo lit by Bonnie Beecher has decided to give both locations an aura of gloom with a greater range of lighting cues for the court than for the madhouse. Yet, she has not otherwise decided to emphasize the disturbing aspects of the madhouse and keeps the howling inmates off stage and out of sight. This focusses our attention on the essentially comic plot of the madhouse scenes. In fact, even though the light can shine more brightly at court, we generally feel a sense of relief when the action brings us back to the madhouse.
While Maxwell leaves the action set in Alicante in Spain as in the original, she has moved it forward to 1938 near the end of the Spanish Civil War. She has Beatrice-Joanna and Alsemero marry during a festival in which a giant puppet of Franco is carried through the streets. Maxwell probably means this to show that the court at Alicante is on the side of the Generalissimo but the puppet looks so comical it seems almost a sign of derision.
One of the principal flaws of the production is the set of the normally fastidious Camellia Koo. On the stage set in the round she has erected four arches with Moorish-style brickwork supported by stone columns that change into the steel rods one finds in reinforced concrete. While Vermandero’s ancient palace can hardly have used reinforced concrete, the point of the rods is to allow the audience to see through the columns. The problem is that if you are sitting at the narrow end of either side of the set as was I, all you see is a curtain of steel rods crossing the entire width of the stage with certain gaps here and there. Since the arches are each placed at an angle and in a diagonal row from the southeast corner of the stage to the northwest, the effect must be similar though with bigger gaps for those sitting along the length of the stage.
This bizarre arrangement means that no one ever can have a clear view of the characters unless they happen to be standing in front of an arch on your side of the stage. Maxwell has likely asked Koo for this deliberately obstructive design because the primary imagery of the play concerns our inability to judge people by their outer appearance. The set may thus reflect this idea in theory but in practice it means that the audience has to spend most of two-and-a-half hours looking through a forest of steel rods to see the actors. And, even when actors happen to be facing your side of the stage, the rods may obscure their faces making watching the play a constantly frustrating experience.
The second major flaw with the production is that Mikaela Davies, in her first major role at Stratford, is simply not ready to play such a complex part as Beatrice-Joanna. Vocally, her voice becomes harsh under pressure and she tends to shout rather than project her lines. In terms of interpretation, she follows Beatrice-Joanna’s general emotional arc of first loathing De Flores, then admiring him for his increasing usefulness to her, to outright loving him. What’s missing is any nuance or sense of inner conflict as her sentiments change from hate to love.
Just as the exaggerated dislike between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing suggests to their friends that they may subconsciously love each, so Beatrice-Joanna’s exaggerate hatred of De Flores should suggest that she is abnormally fascinated by him. With the large number of asides Middleton gives his characters, Davies has numerous opportunities to express conflicting emotions, but far too often Davies merely shifts from one emotion to the next without showing the imprint of the earlier emotion on its successor.
Otherwise, the play is well acted. Chief among the cast is Ben Carlson as De Flores. As usual Carlson is a master at speaking verse with the utmost clarity. He is also a master of nuance and mood. The most recent production of the play at Shakespeare’s Globe in London tried to make De Flores a sympathetic character. Maxwell does not go so far, but she does have Carlson makes us believe that as dangerous a villain as De Flores is, what De Flores does for Beatrice Joanna is not done merely out of lust but for love. Carlson gives is the impression that De Flores sees himself as Beatrice Joanna’s knight-errant, ready to undertake any foul deed to protect her.
Cyrus Lane makes a well-spoken Alsemero, especially good when he confronts Beatrice Joanna in a rage after witnessing her unfaithfulness. Alsemero is not completely the good fellow he seems to be. Otherwise, why does he bring a virginity testing kit with him on his wedding night? For that reason, Lane could afford to lend more of an air of obsessiveness to the character.
Among the madhouse characters, Tim Campbell as Lollio serves as an excellent parallel to Ben Carlson’s De Flores. He, too, speaks 17th-century English with great lucidity that easily lends an air of menace to his words. As Antonio, a nobleman disguised as a madman, Gareth Potter makes the sane Antonio seem hardly the same person as the mad version, so different is his diction and carriage. Jessica B. Hill traces Isabella’s change in feeling toward Antonio from outrage to love to rejection with full psychological clarity to make her seem by the play’s end the only sensible person left. Michael Spencer-Davis is very funny as Isabella’s negligent husband Alibius, so coldly bookish that he can ask Lollio to “take his place” with Isabella without realizing the ribald pun he’s made.
Of the great wealth of Jacobean tragedy, Stratford has staged The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster twice and now The Changeling twice. This leaves two more plays – The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) by Thomas Middleton and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c.1630) by John Ford – for Stratford to do to complete the quartet of the most famous Jacobean tragedies. Then, beyond these, lie other treasures by Ford, Marston, Massinger, Middleton and Webster still to be explored. The present production of The Changeling may be flawed, but the genius of Middleton and Rowley still shines through.
Plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries not only are fascinating in themselves but help to place Shakespeare in a context that merely performing Shakespeare repeatedly cannot do. Seeing the very different dramaturgy and philosophy of playwrights like Middleton and Rowley on stage gives us a point of comparison and contrast with Shakespeare that helps us understand better not just Shakespeare but the entire early modern period. Let’s hope that The Changeling leads to a further exploration of a time of enormous change that now feels more contemporary than ever.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Mikaela Davies as Beatrice Joanna and Ben Carlson as De Flores; Cyrus Lane as Alsemero and Mikaela Davies as Beatrice Joanna; Michael Spencer-Davis as Alibius. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2017-08-25
The Changeling