Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✭✩
by John Ford, directed by Caroline Steinbeis
Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
March 12-April 18, 2015
Oracle: “Revenge proves its own executioner”
Canada is not well acquainted with playwright John Ford (1586-c.1639), even though he is considered one of the greatest of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The Stratford Festival has never presented one of his works, not even his best known play, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c.1629), even though it is regularly taught in undergraduate English courses. Given this, a person really does have to travel to England, where a tradition of performing ‘Tis Pity has developed since its rediscovery in the 20th century and where Ford’s other plays are also revived. This year the Royal Shakespeare Company will present Love’s Sacrifice (c.1632) by Ford from April 11-June 24, and right now Shakespeare’s Globe is presenting The Broken Heart, his beautiful but profoundly unsettling play about will and destiny.
The Broken Heart is often considered a revenge tragedy, but when it was written circa 1625-33, that sub-genre of Jacobean drama had largely disappeared. In its concern with how people should accommodate themselves to fate, the play has much more in common with Shakespeare’s late romances than with revenge tragedies. In fact, in The Broken Heart the oracle of Delphi delivers the prophecy “Revenge proves its own executioner”, which the action of the play bears out. In the stoical worldview of the play, revenge simply has no force.
The action is set in ancient Sparta, an unusual location for a 17th-century play since Spartan society was renowned for its repression of emotions, not their expression. It begins with a situation for which there is no solution. Orgilus (Brian Ferguson) seeks permission from his father (Liam Brennan) to leave for Athens. Orgilus wants this self-imposed exile because Penthea (Amy Morgan), the woman to whom we was betrothed, has been forced by her brother Ithocles (Luke Thompson) to marry Bassanes (Owen Teale), an older, much wealthier nobleman. Bassanes has become so jealous and fearful that Orgilus will try to see Penthea again, he has made a prisoner of her in his own house. To prevent himself from doing anything rash, Orgilus claims he longs for exile.
In fact, he does not leave Sparta but enters a religious order where he can learn news of Penthea and spy on the doings of his own sister Euphrania (Thalissa Teixeira). As it happens Ithocles returns to Sparta as a war hero and the King Amyclas (Patrick Godfrey) and his daughter Calantha (Sarah MacRae) demand Penthea’s presence at court to honour Ithocles.
Gathering Ithocles, Penthea and Orgilus together leads to fraught encounters among them. Though Ithocles ruined Penthea’s life by marrying her to Bassanes, she finds it in her heart not only to forgive Ithocles but to vow to help him in his pursuit of the love of Calantha, who has been promised to the Prince of Argos (Joe Jameson). Orgilus discovers to his dismay that Penthea views her life as so destroyed that she only wishes to die and seeks no help from Orgilus to rescue her. For his part, when Bassanes finds Penthea alone with her brother Ithocles and accuses them of incest, he makes such a fool of himself that Ithocles takes Penthea under his protection.
When Orgilus sees that Penthea’s life with the tyrannical Bassanes has driven her mad, Orgilus can hold back on his revenge against Ithocles no longer. What ensues, however, is quite unexpected. Ithocles, who has already received forgiveness from Penthea and asks pardon of Orgilus, actually welcomes the death that Orgilus has prepared. In fact, he dies with such equanimity and with such repentance for what he has done that he transforms Orgilus’ revenge by the very nobility of his death. The only scene in an earlier revenge tragedy that approaches this is the the death of the Duchess of Malfi in John Webster’s 1613 play of that title, where the nobility of the Duchess’s death causes her executioner to turn against her persecutors. In Ford’s play, Ithocles has no other persecutors but Orgilus, who reports his own crime, accepts his punishment and meets death with as much nobility as Ithocles.
The death of Ithocles has further repercussions which I will not reveal, but it should be clear that Ford’s interest lies not in a complex revenge plot where guilty parties are surprised with agonizing deaths. Rather Ford focusses on how philosophically his characters meet their deaths. His characters do not rail against an untimely end but rather accord themselves to a fate they cannot change. In this The Broken Heart resembles Shakespeare’s romances where destiny rather than individual will controls the action. Prospero’s original plan in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) was to wreak revenge on his brother but by the end he has to recognize the folly of such a notion in a world where higher powers of reconciliation are at work.
In this way The Broken Heart moves forward to an amazing finale epitomized by the emblem of life literally wedded to death. It is like the ending of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606) but purified of all the circumstances of history, of Cleopatra’s ulterior motive of preventing mockery and of any outward means of death. It is an image that imprints itself on the brain as the central metaphor and theme of the play – how to live with a constant knowledge of death.
Director Caroline Steinbeis gives this ending a spectacular staging, but she does err in preceding the play with a dumbshow that sets the action off on the wrong foot. Instead of Ford’s spoken prologue, Steinbeis shows us Orgilus and Penthea happy together when they are suddenly surprised by masked men under Ithocles’ control who forcibly separate the couple, kidnap Penthea and compel her to marry Bassanes. This may seem exciting but it makes Ithocles out to be such a villain that it makes any reconciliation with him later seem impossible. In fact, Orgilus tells his father that Ithocles prevails “By cunning partly, / Partly by threats, ‘a woos at once and forces / His virtuous sister to admit a marriage / With Bassanes” which is not the violent scene we’ve just witnessed.
After intermission, Steinbeis also begins with a dumbshow of dubious usefulness. She has the three main female characters enter the stage from the Wanamaker’s three doors as if they were mechanical figures of a clock. Luke Thompson as Ithocles joins Calantha in a automaton-styled dance before the actors retreat through their doors. If this is meant to demonstrate that the characters are all subject to time, as the play points out, Steinbeis’s clockwork action seems to parody the theme rather than give it its necessary weight.
For a play that few audience members will ever have seen, it is important to make the relation among the characters clear. Designer Max Jones does not always succeed in this. He clothes the court of Sparta in long robes but dresses Orgilus and his father Crotolon as if they were medieval peasants. This unhelpfully obscures the fact that Crotolon is an aristocrat and a member of the court and that Orgilus is just as noble as Ithocles. When near the end Calantha assumes the throne after her father’s death, Jones gives her an impressive metal outfit flown in from above with metal wings, a breastplate and a metal farthingale. Calantha is a virgin queen and Steinbeis and Jones seem to want to reinforce this idea as much as possible. The only problem is that the rigidity of the apparatus inhibits actor Sarah MacRae from fully enacting her final lines.
Max Jones’s best idea is the simplest. Through the play he has placed a red carpet leading from the middle door and dividing the stage in tow. On the one hand, it represents the traditional welcome for royalty. On the other, it is a perfect symbol of the “broken heart” as well as suggesting the steady outflow of blood that marks the decease of two of the main characters.
Owen Teale gives an excellent performance as Bassanes. He successfully portrays his character as the stereotypical hyper-jealous husband of commedia dell’arte only to shed generic expectations and transform him into a human character who falls into deep repentance for his folly. It’s no wonder Sir Laurence Olivier chose to play the role when he revived the play in 1962. Luke Thompson’s Ithocles shows the many sides of his character from proud conqueror, to hopeless lover to a man whose repentance and nobility in death set the pattern for all the others.
In contrast to these a question mark hangs over Brian Ferguson’s performance as Orgilus. He is a very complex character who carries out his revenge more out of duty than emotion and then seeks out punishment for his crime. When the emotional side of his revenge subsides and the sense of duty takes over is a key transformation that neither Fergus nor director Steinbeis make clear. He speaks so sincerely of his plans to his father and to his philosophy master (Peter Hamilton Dyer) that we don’t know if he really believes what he says, is a master of deceit or is deceiving himself.
These flaws aside, The Broken Heart is such an important and unjustly neglected play that anyone with an interest in 17th-century drama should rush to see it. One reason that critics have often rated the play as Ford’s best is that with the play Ford creates a type of tragedy new to English drama. It is a tragedy with fallible human beings instead of villains. Ithocles, Bassanes and Orgilus who do wrong repent so sincerely for their crimes that repentance wipes away the stain of guilt. Those who are wronged like Penthea and Calantha find such stores of forgiveness in themselves that their magnanimity raises them to near immortal status. In The Broken Heart Ford creates an existential tragedy where characters living in a flawed world circumscribed with death attempt to live the most virtuous life they can. It is a fascinating project and one can only wonder what would have developed had the Puritan Revolution not closed the theatres for twenty years.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Luke Thompson (Ithocles), Patrick Godfrey (Amyclas) and Sarah MacRae (Calantha); Brian Ferguson (Orgilus); Owen Teale (Bassanes) and Amy Morgan (Penthea). ©2015 Marc Brenner.
For tickets, visit www.shakespearesglobe.com.
2015-03-16
London, GBR: The Broken Heart