The Revenger’s Tragedy
National Theatre, London
SEX and violence is as much a theme of Jacobean drama as it is of more recent culture. The main difference is that while the 17th-century Brits allowed themselves to wallow in filth in the sure and certain knowledge that they would have to repent if they wanted to get into heaven, we no longer have that sense of eternal judgement. Our sex and violence is too often simply amoral and casual.
In The Revenger’s Tragedy – once thought to have been written by Cyril Tourneur, but now ascribed to Thomas Middleton – a story about vengeance turns quickly and horribly into a series of increasingly brutal betrayals and killings. The main character, Vindice, has vowed revenge on the Duke who has murdered his mistress. In order to get close enough to kill him, Vindice disguises himself as a pimp. The action hots up when the Duke’s roving eye turns on Vindice’s virginal sister.
As a picture of an Italian Renaissance court, this is typical of English propaganda of the 17th century: Italians were Roman Catholics, so the Protestant Brits saw them as licentious, untrustworthy and depraved. Sexual lust drives these human monsters; death becomes sexualised and killing erotic. Ghastly acts follow ghastly acts, but in the end repentance looms. And a sense of justice: when the bad bleed, then is the tragedy good.
Director Melly Still turns this Jacobean drama, first staged in 1606, into a modern carnival of sex and violence. The play opens with the Olivier stage’s massive revolve turning through scenes of seduction and rape, as huge images of a grinning skull, a Caravaggio-style painting, a bloodied mask imprint themselves on the retina. The music is pounding disco and the dancing contemporary. Forget Renaissance Italy, this is London today.
Still is a very visual director and the stage images in the play work much better than the acting. In most scenes, the actors – led by Rory Kinnear’s cynical and comic Vindice – play directly to the audience and very rarely even look at each other. The result is less a drama about real people than a pantomime of cartoon villainy and overblown sexuality. Clearly, this diffuses both the horror and undercuts the morality of the original play.
Some scenes are excellent, however. Vindice’s eventual murder of the Duke, which is accomplished by using the dressed-up skeleton of his fiancée, whose poisoned lips the Duke is fooled into kissing, offers a fine use of puppetry and gleeful horror. As he dies, Vindice shows him the sight of his wife having it off with another man. The sheer sadism of the situation comes across with a chilling tingle. Here, Middleton give us a good excuse to enjoy the perverse delights of revenge.
Most of the production is well-spoken, even when the actors are busy declaiming to the audience rather than speaking to each other. Elliot Cowan as the Duke’s son and heir and Billy Carter as his illegitimate offspring are both luridly impressive, while Katherine Manners is suitably coy as Vindice’s virtuous sister. Even if you have doubts about the National’s house style of playing all the classics in modern dress, some of this production’s gothic darkness does stay with you.
Aleks Sierz
