Elsewhere
Elsewhere
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by Thomas Middleton & William Rowley, directed by Dominic Dromgoole
Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
January 20-March 1, 2015
Beatrice-Joanna: “I'm forc’d to love thee now”
I was very lucky to catch the final performance of The Changeling at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Playhouse, which opened only last year, is a reproduction of an indoor theatre of Shakespeare’s time, not unlike Blackfriars, and complements the open-air theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, to which it is adjacent. It complements the Globe in another way by choosing as it repertoire the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, a treasure trove of drama sorely neglected by classical theatres in North America.
Any student of English drama will be able to affirm that The Changeling is one of the masterpieces of Jacobean drama. Yet, it has been presented only once at the Stratford Festival, back in 1989 in a production for the then-extant Young Company directed by Kelly Handerek. While the play is a good choice for a group of young actors, the Globe production demonstrates that the play benefits immensely when performed by more seasoned actors. Besides that, director Dominic Dromgoole has approached the text in quite a new way.
It is not unusual for plays in the Elizabethan or Jacobean period to have multiple authors. Shakespeare himself collaborated with John Fletcher on Henry VIII (1613) and on The Two Noble Kinsmen (1614). What makes the collaboration of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley so unusual in The Changeling is that the authors make no attempt to relate the scenes they wrote to each other in terms of plot until very late in the action. Middleton’s scenes concerning the court alternate with Rowley’s concerning the madhouse forcing the audience to draw the connection between the two spheres of action. Even though the two plots do not interact until the end, Rowley’s plot reflects Middleton’s so closely that the audience can’t help but perceive the radical notion that the world of the court is not really so different from that of the madhouse.
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 also seeks her affection. In the court scenes written by Middleton, Vermandero (Liam Brennan) has arranged a marriage between his daughter Beatrice-Joanna (Hattie Morahan) and Alonzo de Piraquo (Tom Stuart). The problem is that another young nobleman, Alsemero (Simon Harrison), 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 Deflores (Trystan Gravelle), usually spelled “De Flores”. Now she thinks she can kill two birds with one stone by asking Deflores to murder Alonzo and then go into exile. Unfortunately, Deflores sees this as an opportunity to gain power over Beatrice.
Meanwhile in the madhouse scenes written by Rowley, the asylum owner Alibius (Phil Whitchurch) complains what it is to have a young wife like his Isabella (Sarah MacRae). He has his servant Lollio (Pearce Quigley) guard her jealously. Alibius’ ruse is foiled by the nobleman Antonio (Brian Ferguson), called Tony, who feigns madness to gain access to Isabella. Once inside, he discovers that another nobleman Franciscus (Adam Lawrence) has used exactly the same ploy. When Isabella asks for help with the situation, Lollio declares that he has always loved Isabella and expects some reward.
Jacobean tragedy has a reputation for its atmosphere of doom and corruption deriving from such well-known examples as John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614) and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c. 1633). Most directors try to force The Changeling into this mold. Dominic Dromgoole, however, has read the text closely and has allowed the text. rather than preconceptions of the genre, to dictate how it is performed. What he finds is that the scenes in the madhouse are not as creepy as others would have them but are really quite funny since they do not involve people who are actually mad but only pretending to be mad.
More radically, Dromgoole has found that the court scenes are not as gloomy as they are usually portrayed. Dromgoole finds that Deflores, usually cast as the irredeemable villain of the piece, has developed a bitter sense of humour in response to his hopeless love for Beatrice-Joanna. This discovery means that there is a further parallel between the two worlds of the play, since both servants, Lollio and Deflores are the principal wits, no matter how bitter, of madhouse and court.
Finding mordant humour in Deflores’s speeches is part of Dromgoole’s general approach of humanizing the character. Deflores is consistently described as hideously “deformed”, as if, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, his physical deformity reflected his spiritual deformity. Dromgoole, however, gives Deflores only a birthmark in the form of a port-wine stain on the left-hand side of his face. This changes the situation since whether the others at court, especially Beatrice, consider this mottling of an otherwise well-formed face a “deformity” reflects more the viewer’s perception than the reality of how Deflores looks.
Second, Deflores is not the proficient killer here as he is in other productions. Dromgoole deliberately portrays Deflores murder of Alonzo as nearly botched. After two stabs, Alonzo is only wounded and is still crawling about and calling for help. In the agonizing scene it takes the desperate Deflores several more attacks on Alonzo both from the front and back to silence him. When Deflores cuts off Alonzo’s finger to get the ring stuck to it, this does not appear so much as amoral efficiency as general ineptitude.
After Beatrice discovers Alsemero’s secret alchemical laboratory where he has concocted the means to tell whether a woman is a virgin or not, it is not surprising that she should lose faith in Alsemero, who clearly has never had faith in any woman, and begin to admire Deflores who undergoes such risks as in setting the fire to cover up the death of Beatrice’s maid Diaphanta (Thalissa Teixeira). Her statement to him, “I'm forc’d to love thee now, ’Cause thou provid’st so carefully for my honour”, is not just a declaration of her descent into depravity but a statement of truth since Deflores really is the only man willing to protect her honour, no matter what the cost.
What the play loses in humanizing Deflores is a sense of menace. In Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl in 2006, both the court scenes and the madhouse scenes were infused with danger and we felt unease whenever Will Keen as De Flores appeared. What the production gains is clarity. The madhouse scenes which make up half the text, do not appear merely as a distraction from the court scenes but as a depiction of another way in which the same scenario can work out. The principal irony of the action is that being kept in a madhouse has made Isabella wise. Isabella’s goal is to make her husband a better husband, and she fends off the advances of her three suitors because having seen the worst in the world she can see through their ruses. Beatrice, however, falls into Deflores’ hands because she has been kept too innocent of the world. It is her naiveté that undoes her.
Hattie Morahan is excellent at conveying Beatrice’s peculiar innocence that she maintains even after Deflores commits murder for her, even after she has been forced to sleep with him. Part of Middleton’s point is to demonstrate how an innocent person can so easily be led into a life of deceit. Trystan Gravelle’s Deflores is understandably gruff and bitter, but strangely he emerges as the most romantic of all the male suitors in the play. He kills himself beside the dead Beatrice saying, “I would not go to leave thee far behind”, as if he were another Romeo.
In a production where the madhouse scenes are finally presented in full and finally get their due, Pearce Quigley stands out as an hilarious Lollio, in fact, the funniest Lollio I’ve ever seen. His distinctly bone-dry delivery of his lines only makes them more amusing. Brian Ferguson is amusing in quite another way as the hapless Tony, who is quite inexpert at pretending he is mad. Phil Whitchurch is a fussy, self-involved Alibius, but not the tyrant some directors make him. We do, after all, have to see why Isabella still loves him. For her part Sarah MacRae’s Isabella is the strongest female character in the play, one who knows herself and what she wants. The fact that she takes on a madwoman’s disguise to trick Tony only shows how in command of herself she is.
Special mention should be made of Matt Doherty, who plays a madman Dromgoole has added to the madhouse scenes. Lollio is forever calling forth a madman or a fool from their cells, and every time Doherty bursts forth hoping he is wanted. This is a running gag that should wear thin, but Doherty’s undaunted, boundless enthusiasm and Quigley’s exasperated groan of “Not you, not you!” kept the joke fresh every time.
The last Alsemero I saw was Tom Hiddleston for Cheek by Jowl. He was able to suggest that Alsemero’s romantic expostulations were a bit much and perhaps hid his true nature rather than revealed it. This has to be true, given Alsemero’s secret laboratory. In the present production Simon Harrison is never able to evoke any sense of suspicion and merely seems like a typically bland lover. In contrast, Thalissa Teixeira makes much more of the role of Diaphanta than I’ve seen before. Her enactment of the bizarre effects of Alsemero’s test liquid, made them seem absolutely natural and her enthusiasm about playing the bed trick on Alsemero seemed to stem not from decadence but from the chance to enjoy a good night of sex for a change.
Dromgoole made good use of the Wanamaker theatre. When the scenes switches from the madhouse to the court just before the fire scene, Dromgoole had the Madmen blow out all the candles in the chandeliers that light the theatre. This plunged the stage into nearly complete darkness and the swinging and untwisting of the chandeliers above added to the atmosphere of confusion in the scene. In the play is it only Deflores who suffers pangs of conscience – seeing the ghost of Alonzo, being unable to kill his avenging brother, and seeing the ghost of Diaphanta. Dromgoole cleverly had Diaphanta so made up that the burn on the left side of her face mimicked Deflores’ own birthmark.
One can hope that the success of this production, so rapturously received by the closing night audience, will lead to a revival next season. If not, we can hope that the classical theatres in Canada will manage to overcome their blind Bardolatry to realize that the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries help put Shakespeare’s own work into context and show us how others responded to the same concerns he did. The best work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries should be seen at least as often, if not more often, than Shakespeare’s lesser works. The Changeling hasn’t been done at Stratford for 26 years. Surely the time for a revival by the Festival, or some other enterprising company, has come.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Hattie Morahan as Beatrice-Joanna; Tom Stuart as Alonzo and Trystan Gravelle as Deflores, ©2015 Tristram Kenton; Brain Ferguson as Tony and Pearce Quigley as Lollio, ©2015 Marc Brenner.
For tickets, visit www.shakespearesglobe.com.
2015-03-02
London, GBR: The Changeling