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by John Webster, directed by Maria Aberg

Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, GBR

March 8-August 4, 2018

Antonio: “Make patience a noble fortitude,

     And think not how unkindly we are us’d"

In 2016 Maria Aberg directed a successful, thought-provoking production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a play with a corrupted text that requires imaginative direction to make it work on stage.  This year Aberg has directed John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, one of the greatest play’s by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  Rather  than digging into the play to illuminate its meaning as she did with Doctor Faustus, Aberg unfortunately has bought into the seriously flawed design concept of Naomi Dawson that narrows both the meaning of the play and the complexity of its characters.

In her designer’s note, Dawson states, “Maria came to me knowing that she wanted to focus the production on masculinity and madness”.  To this end, Dawson says, “A model of masculinity has historically been found in both sport and the military.  Both areas represent a socially acceptable arena and outlet for competitiveness and aggression.  We were interested in drawing a line from the sporting world, through to the military....  The culmination of this journey, at the peak of the play’s violence, is an implosion where the ensemble of men become Webster’s ‘Mad Men’”.

There are flaws with this notion both in itself and in the ways that Aberg and Dawson have used it to distort the action and characters for Webster’s play.  First, to draw a line from sport to the military to madness makes no sense in itself especially from the feminist perspective that Aberg and Dawson espouse.  Those who know history whether of ancient Greece or of Easter Island will know that military conflict precedes rather than follows from sport.  Sport, whether the Olympics in Greece or the Birdman Contest in Easter Island, were the enlightened methods of avoiding the actual violence of military action and transforming it into the peaceful competitiveness of sport.  The revival of the modern Olympics occurred in the same spirit that sport channels competitiveness between nations to further peace. 

The second inherent flaw is that while sport and the military may have been historically masculine preserves, we now celebrate women’s entry into both.  If sport and the military are so toxically masculine, why should we applaud women for making inroads into them?  If so, are Aberg and Dawson asserting that women lose their inherent femininity by doing so?  If not, then why identify the two arenas as masculine?

As applied to the play, Aberg does show the transformation of her chorus of largely non-speaking males beginning with tightly choreographed athletic exercises and gradually turning into a military squadron.  The leap from a growling military group to gentle, beautifully singing madmen is so great one can hardly see how the latter is the direct result of the former. 

The application of the sport-military-madness notion to the play creates a Procrustean bed into which Aberg has forced the action and characters only by doing harm to both.  If, indeed, sport leads to military action and then to madness, why does Aberg not show us the Duchess’s two evil brothers participating in the exercises of either?  It is clear from the text that the Duchess’s unathletic brother Ferdinand (whom Dawson dresses in a pink suit) is already close to madness without having passed from sports to the military, while his similarly unathletic brother the Cardinal is coolly sane.  What Webster shows us is that the two brothers who do evil to their sister have completely opposite personalities.  Isn’t it thus far more disturbing that their misogynist treatment of the Duchess can proceed both from madness and well as sanity?

To force her view of masculinity=abuse on the play, Aberg has the Cardinal (Chris New) rape his mistress Julia (Aretha Ayeh) just shortly after meeting her (a scene not in Webster).  This significantly distorts the character of the Cardinal, who, as the text repeatedly emphasizes is unemotional to an almost abnormal degree compared to his brother Ferdinand or to his sister the Duchess.

The idea of masculinity=abuse hardly fits the other male characters of the play.  The Duchess (Joan Iyiola) courts her steward Antonio (Paul Woodson) herself, who in Dawson’s design is made out to be a typical nerd with thick, black-rimmed glasses and skinny necktie.  Antonio is clearly meant to be a good, if slightly naive man, or else we have to think the Duchess’s judgement is faulty, so why do Aberg and Dawson strive so hard to prove that masculinity in general is toxic?  Delio (Greg Barnett), Antonio’s friend, is also a good man who saves Antonio from the machinations of Ferdinand and the Cardinal.  Other male characters like Julia’s aged husband Castruccio, Aberg has omitted.

The most obvious flaw with Aberg and Dawson’s point of view it that it downplays the major transformation of the character Bosola (Nicolas Tennant), whose name means “compass”, at the heart of the play.  Bosola begins as a thug, a man just off the galleys as punishment for his crimes. He’s hired by Ferdinand to watch the widowed Duchess to insure that she doesn’t marry again.  He does watch her even to the point where she is with child, but never guesses that Antonio is the Duchess’s new husband.  Yet, when he sees what cruel psychological torture Ferdinand and the Cardinal subject the Duchess to, Bosola’s sentiments change and from her death in Act 3 onwards he vows to fight her cause and seek revenge on her two brothers.  Bosola’s signal change of heart in no way fits in with Aberg and Dawson’s view of masculinity. 

Yet, so fixated are Aberg and Dawson on the image of men slaughtering each other that they end the play with Bosola dying in the final scene in Act 5 and omit Webster’s ending in which Delio returns with the Duchess’s son by Antonio.  This cutting does grave violence to the play and shows a profound misunderstanding of Webster’s plan.  Webster has the title character of his play executed in Act 4, but his purpose is to demonstrate that her example is so strong that her presence is felt throughout the following act of the play.  Thus we have the famous and eerie echo scene of Act 5, Scene 3, when the voice of Duchess from the grave seems to answer Antonio’s questions.  Thus we have Bosola transforming himself into the avenger of wrongs done to the Duchess.  And thus, to cap everything off, we have the appearance at the end of the son of the Duchess and Antonio, the embodiment of her will and inheritor of her lands and those of her brothers.  Her son is her final triumph after death and to omit him from the end is to distort the play and its meaning.   

To link the ideas of masculinity and violence, Dawson has designed a set that she calls a combination of a gymnasium and an abattoir.  To that end the floor of the stage is painted with lines that almost suggest a basketball court, but not quite.  As a prelude to the action, Aberg has the Duchess hoist a (fake) beheaded bull up upstage left where it hangs by its hind legs for the remainder of the play.  Why she and not one or both violent masculine brothers hoists it is unclear.  When the Duchess is imprisoned in Act 4, the bull is cut in the groin whence it exudes litres of stage blood that forms a large pool on the playing area.  (Note to director: blood drains from a hoisted carcass from the lowermost area, not the uppermost.)  Here the Duchess and her maid Cariola (Amanda Hadingue) are executed and later Julia is killed with the poisoned Bible.

Aberg obviously wants to present a blood-drenched Jacobean drama, but if so she should really have chosen one where most of the characters are dispatched with knives or swords like Titus Andronicus or Macbeth.  In Duchess, the first four deaths are by strangulation and the fifth by poison.  Only the final four deaths are by stab wounds they all occurs in the last moments of the fifth act.  Therefore, the

pool of blood is merely a gimmick of décor.  It allows the ghost of the dead Duchess to emerge from the pool soaked through with blood and it allows Aberg to make the point that even those who think to steer clear of guilt for murder, like Ferdinand and the Cardinal,  are eventually and literally steeped in blood.  Otherwise, it serves as a distractingly unsafe surface for both actors and audience.  The audience in the front side rows in the Swan Theatre are provided blankets at intermission to help shields them from the blood, but I was sitting in the front row facing forward, unprovided with a blanket, and received glops of blood on my face and hair that no blanket would have warded off.

What helps save this Duchess from disaster are the fine performances of the cast.  Joan Iyiola is unusually intense in the title role from beginning to end moving from fear of her plans being discovered at the start to fierce resignation at the end.  It might have been better to aim more for calm and disdain rather than fierceness at the end because fierceness can look too much like struggle and that is the opposite of what the Duchess’s model death should illustrate in contrast to the ignoble, fearful death of Amanda Hadingue’s Cariola.

Alexander Cobb gives a superb performance as Ferdinand using a blank, dispassionate expression as a sign of the dissociation between his thoughts and his actions.  This expression only serves to amplify the impact of the horrifying things he says and does.  When Ferdinand descends into lycanthropy as we later learn, Cobb shows us the raging beast that has always been lurking beneath the Duke’s all-too-composed façade of deportment.

Chris New with his strong, low voice would be an excellent Cardinal.  He is at his best when Aberg allows him to play his role as the icy cold rational counterpart to his disturbed brother.  Aberg’s attempts to make him appear hot-blooded simply seem out of character and don’t accord with the Cardinal’s inherently secretive, detached manner.

Nicolas Tennant certainly portrays Bosola as a low-born, rough-hewn cynic.  Tennant speaks his lines in an off-the-cuff manner as if he knew anything Bosola said would be disregarded by those who believe they are his betters.  Tennant does give Bosola a new urgency when he decides to turn against his employers in memory of the Duchess, but one would wish he would change his manner of line delivery even more to match his change of heart 

Paul Woodson is likely given a Scots accent to make his Antonio appear as an outsider to the court of Malfi.  The effect is to make him seem even more geeky than his already awkward body movements suggest.  Yet, beneath the habits he has been saddled with, Woodson does make Antonio’s essential goodness shine through.  One of the best sequences in the play comes near the very beginning when Antonio, as the Duchess’s steward, comes to realize that the Duchess is actually wooing him.  Woodson shows how Antonio has to adjust himself to the fact that what had been a hopeless dream of his is actually turning to reality.

Under different direction  and with the very same cast, this Duchess of Malfi could have been a great success.  It is far better acted and has far less bizarre a concept than that used in the Duchess of the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in 2006.  It is a great pity that neither the present director nor the designer could see how the reductive concept that they forced upon the play restricted its meaning and, in fact, diminished the impact of the title role that they had intended to enhance.  Joan Iyiola is so far the best Duchess I have yet seen since she so vividly brings out the extraordinary range of emotions necessary for the role.  I certainly look forward to seeing Iyiola again as well as Alexander Cobb and Chris New in future RSC productions.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Alexander Cobb as Ferdinand and Chris New as the Cardinal; Joan Iyiola as the Duchess, Alexander Cobb as Ferdinand with members of then company; Joan Iyiola as the Duchess of Malfi. ©2018 Helen Maybanks.  

For tickets, visit www.rsc.org.uk.