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Shockeroo playhouse...
I was walking past the Embankment last night when three girls ran by wearing plastic devil’s horns that lit up red in the dark. They whirled away, dancing to a nearby reggae street band. A fitting epilogue to Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, just letting out at the National Theatre. The doings onstage were pretend Satanism, too. The National exists to keep classic plays alive, but Middleton’s carnival of gore, which piles up eight bodies in the last scene alone, leaving not one named character alive, made the audience laugh – not what the playwright intended. What began as shock value turned into a bloody Feydeau farce by intermission, and the last half played like Monty Python awaiting Eric Idle to prance out with an executioner’s axe. Calling Nankipoo. The actors weren’t winking at us, but there’s only so much oozing crimson you can take.
The production used tricks to keep the audience’s nerves frayed. There was dry humping and ambisexual cavorting behind a scrim. Also the scraping of an electric violin when you least expected it (a sound that makes cats in heat sound like lullabies). A crowd of cut-purses and whores populated the back of the revolving set. I think they were asking for spare change. Otherwise, the only emotions being expressed for three hours were two: lasciviousness and rage. The first moment of the play introduces the chief enraged revenger, Vindice, fondling the skull of his murdered fiancée, who fell prey to the rapine lust of the Duke (no surname or place given, although Italy among the Montefeltros and Sforzas was a byword for knifing, poisoning, and riotous luxury in Shakespeare’s time and after). Later the Duke would be tricked into kissing that skull, now daubed with poison, as a prelude to being stabbed and nearly eviscerated. The Duke’s son, code named Lussurioso, was the most entertaining character since he organized carnal encounters, assassinations, and double crosses as casually as you or I file our nails, but much quicker.
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| Rory Kinnear as Vindice in the Revenger's Tragedy, photo Johan Persson |
So much for the ludicrous side of the spectacle. I kept thinking, in another vein, about Hamlet, the true revenger’s tragedy. Middleton picked up a handful of situations from Shakespeare – not just revenge, which was common enough to be a cliché, but delayed revenge, lascivious step-fathers, erring mothers tempted into sin, as well as soliloquies attending these situations. Middleton’s versions are floriferous junk by comparison. T.S. Eliot famously said that Middleton had no purpose as a dramatist but was unequalled as a “recorder,” i.e., he had a pitch-perfect ear for the language of the Jacobean underworld. Listening to The Revenger’s Tragedy, my mind reeled at the playwright’s prodigious, profligate, totally amoral enthusiasm for metaphor. No one living or dead could think of so many ways to rant about the decadent times they lived in. Middleton’s common coin is bawdry, incest, betrayal, rape, whores, murder, and everything seamy, which he turns into the most entertaining verbal display imaginable. No doubt he knew how absurdly flimsy his play was, with its instantaneous volte faces, but that hardly matters. The outcome isn’t even tragic – everybody is snuffed out, and that’s that.
Serious London actors are trained to speak in iambic pentameter with such fluency that Jacobean idioms come across as perfectly intelligible. This cast was no exception. The popular actor Rory Kinnear, a natural comedian, was too pleasant to be believable as the ferocious Vindice, and his brother Hippolito, a subsidiary fiend, was played by one of the cool stars of The History Boys, Jamie Parker, giving the bloodletting an air of schoolroom pranks. Even so, they spoke thrillingly, and the actor with the longest part, Elliot Cowan as randy, murderous Lussurioso, looked like Sting as a meth head and turned the whole stage into his private carnal bedchamber.
Yet for all its fun, this modern-dress production left a bitter taste. I thought about Middleton’s audience, who were well-born sophisticates, not the general rabble. They were all aware of the Puritans, who are made fun of for their prudishness several times in the play (a lesser work by Middleton is entitled The Puritan). Piety in general is mocked; utmost lasciviousness and treachery are portrayed in a devil-may-care manner, as if loucheness were nothing a gentleman or lady should worry about. Middleton was a creature of the same attitude he pandered to, so there’s no clear message about decadence and debauchery in his writing. For that reason, I found The Revenger’s Tragedy unsettling, even insidious. It came off the way home movies of Marie Antoinette might: frippery that outsiders would take very seriously. In Middleton’s case, seriously enough to close the theatres and lop off the king’s head. Those mishaps came almost a generation later, but there must be a moral here about mocking the devil at your own peril.
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