FringeReview UK 2024

The Duchess of Malfi

Wanamaker Globe

Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Contemporary, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Wanamaker Globe, Shakespeare’s Globe

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

It’s hardly surprising with Francesca Mills as the eponymous Duchess, this production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, directed by Rachel Bagshaw (Midnight Movie) in her Globe debut, has almost sold out.

Especially after Mills’ Hermia here last year and the tragic Poppy in All of Us in 2022, it’s surely a role Mills is born to play and she gives her finest performance yet.

This historically-recorded attempt of two aristocratic brothers to stifle the sexuality of their young widowed sister shudders with relevance.

It’s an exceptionally lucid, relatively uncut and faithful reading too, currently running at two hours 45. In one sense that’s all you need to know before booking a ticket. In another, much thrills and tantalizes, if occasionally frustrates.

Returning to the Wanamaker Globe after it opened this space in 2014 (on the play’s own 400^th) then directed by Dominic Dromgoole and starring Gemma Arterton, it’s fascinating to see how things change too. Even the use of candlelight – for which Webster designed his stretchy-shadowed tragedy – has shifted.

Wanamaker repertoire till 2020 included Shakespeare’s contemporaries and hopefully will again. This season though, we’ve enjoyed a sulphurous candlelit Ghosts as well as a superbly-detailed Line of Duty-style Othello. Both these are deeply-imagined worlds.

Like Ola Ince’s Othello, this Duchess interleaves contemporary references early on. Unlike that insolently, magnificently re-instrumented production, these mostly fizzle out. They’re limited to one “fuck”, “Botox” and a James Cleverley-inspired knockout of Rohypnol uttered by Glyn Pritchard. Later in his madness the Duchess’ brother Ferdinand (Oliver Johnstone)  obsesses “boys will be boys” and “she was asking for it”.

Though nominally contemporary, its world though is as fuzzy as these asides. Happily set and costume designer Ti Green produces a starkly simple set of three ascending plinths and a magnolia-painted backstage; with a revolve dead-centre. On it are introduced the three siblings – Mills, Cardinal (Jamie Ballard) and Johnstone’s Ferdinand.

It works deftly and hard. At one point Mills is laid out cruciform; at another Ferdinand lies down beside her. All kinds of trio apex themselves there: wedding vows and witness, family trios, death.

Mills’ sheer presence lights up this tenebrous world. Vocally she towers over all in a blazing arc of passion and intelligence; cuts through the candlelit cat’s-cradle of lies and entrapments laid by the brothers and their reluctant creature Bosola (Arthur Hughes, recently acclaimed for his RSC Richard III).

The Duchess not only defies her brothers’ stars, making her choice on a ‘lowly’ Steward: she fleers wit at her antagonists. It’s a production full of sly fun, too, nearly every character riffing off it.

Mills is also tender and vulnerable. Confiding in her maid Cariola (Shazia Nicholls, spirited and with real agency of her own) the scene where she woos her warm, if innocent Steward Antonio (Olivier Huband, all baffled nobility) is charged with joy and a flurry of desire, wit – at all times – and teasing sexuality, where Mills can conspiratorially wink with Nicholls’ Cariola.

With Huband, Nicholls and daughters Poppy Kunorubwe and Ela Soetan (who take it in turns to have the last word), Mills carves a private haven of light: which softens and glows, ready to be snuffed. Such snuffing is (as ever) tellingly integrated.

Even on her final exit, Mills makes a virtue of getting up, then before disappearing glares back at the audience: “I am Duchess of Malfi still” doesn’t need repeating. In one of those disconnects that leave some wanting to re-engineer the last act, Mills’ voice cuts through more than as echo to Antonio’s haunted ears.

Hughes’ Bosola embodies the contemporary ex-soldier, abandoned after Afghanistan, with a more likeable, relaxed, humanly convincing Bosola than we’re used to; which makes his volte-face more credible. Someone unmeridianed without a moral compass, having done galley penance for the Cardinal and still unrewarded. There’s less post-Iago mercenary out of prison, more improvisatory plotting.

Vocally though no-one  matches Mills, who turns on verbs and flashes back pronouns on a hotwire. This has to be down to direction, since there’s experienced Shakespeareans here.

Bagshaw’s emphasis on clarity and completeness brings many rewards, even if her cast don’t always lend vocal energy to verse-speaking; occasionally chopping it up and landing on different emphases. Nevertheless when Hughes for instance skirls ”End your groan and come away” it snaps with testy finality.

And minor characters sparkle. The licensed Rodrigo and idiot suitor Malateste (David Burnett) kick-starts comedy with absurd croonings taken up mockingly by others when he’s gone.

A long-married Julia (Tamzin Griffin) allures with a sophistication absent from many Julias (and a Cardinal’s mistress would need to be high-society) and adds a suggestiveness to that world. The Castruccio and Pescara of Glyn Pritchard bite into visual memory like acid on copper caricatures, and Hari MacKinnon’s Silvio, also a pernickety Doctor and Duke of Ancona serve turns of malice and flummery.

All including Lorraine Adeyefa and Joshua Dunn delight in the mad scene where the musicians led by Joley Cragg descend from the gallery to almost drown out the madmen, whose words explode on the walls in inspired riot.

Ballard’s Cardinal is all ice and chasm: you sense his fall too with “a thing arm’d with a rake/that seems to strike at me” just before the thing does, a highlight; and his chilly dealings with Julia.

Johnstone after his smooth, sociopathic Henry V here in 2022 seems ideal for Ferdinand. At this stage – it’s early in the run – his transition to Lycanthropia moves more from sullen to sudden, though with the panther-like sheen of his Henry. His misogyny seethes, though his incestuous passion is best expressed after the Duchess dies.

Bagshaw though engages with the sheer witchery of plotting, misogynistic sadism – the dark scene with the hand absolutely crawls – and a certain hovering evil.

It’s not the darkest Wanamaker production, but Sarah Readman’s captioned words, kerned in period typeface, project white onto backstage walls, snake downstage, across on gallery panels. It’s biblical and witchy. The Wanamaker aesthetic’s a bit kerned here too, but Bagshaw’s experience at Unicorn Theatre prioritises clarity over all; there were many teenagers in the audience.

Costumes are augmented with party masks and sudden military berets, but tell us less. Composer Anna Clock matches with a score of mournful celebration; ominous with twang, percussion, woodwind wails and snatch of Shakespeare’s Sister.

There’s so much to admire here that it’s a happy duty to urge you to see it, if you can, any way you can.

Published March 4, 2024March 4, 2024 by Simon Jenner