People expecting punishment won’t be disappointed: Almeida’s Duchess of Malfi reviewed

The Duchess of Malfi is one of those classics that everyone knows by name but not many have witnessed on stage. So a production is likely to attract theatre-goers who feel they ‘ought to’ see it rather than ‘want to’. This may have affected the Almeida’s version which is opaque and almost impossible to follow. Yet audience members who are expecting punishment rather than entertainment will not be disappointed.

The play by John Webster was first presented in London in 1613 (or possibly a year later), and it relies on events that occurred in Italy more than a century earlier between 1508 and 1513. So even the original London audience would have had to work hard to follow the unfamiliar plot which traces the elopement of an Italian duchess with her steward. She bears him three children while her jealous brothers, one of whom is a cardinal, send a spy to monitor her actions. She hatches a counter-intrigue and pretends that the steward has been driven into exile under suspicion of stealing her jewellery. Complicated subplots proliferate involving secret informers, disguised assassins, strangulations that go wrong, and a bizarre passage in which Ferdinand, the Duchess’s insane twin brother, succumbs to the delusion that he’s a wolf.

Rebecca Frecknall’s show uses modern dress and this decision destroys a key element in the story: social pedigree. The brothers are angered that the Duchess has imperilled the family fortune and tarnished their good name by marrying a lowly steward. Yet it’s impossible to discern the variations in rank between any of the characters because all the cast are togged up in the same dreary high-street casualwear. Period costume would at least have given us a chance to note the difference between the Duchess, the Prince, the Cardinal, the manservant and the lady’s maid.

Although Webster was Shakespeare’s contemporary, his qualities as a dramatist are inestimably inferior.