December 6, 2014, by Peter Kirwan

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

The 2014 winter season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse brings together a range of plays that exemplify what Susan Bennett and others refer to as the ‘Jacobean’ – less a specific historical period and more an aesthetic established as oppositional to Shakespeare, foregrounding sex, violence and abandon. This aesthetic usually updates the setting and cultural references of plays such as The White Devil, The Changeling, The Revenger’s Tragedy and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, appropriating contemporary tropes of bloody spectacle and graphic sexuality. It was eye-opening, then, to see a ‘Jacobean’ production at the Sam Wanamaker.

Where the playhouse’s previous tragedy, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, had used the period setting to approach the play with more formal dignity than in other recent productions, ‘Tis Pity put its bloody heart (literal and metaphorical) right into the audience’s faces. Giovanni and Annabella were revealed fully naked mid-coitus following their first declarations of love; Bergetto and Hippolita’s deaths were accompanied by wailing, crashing of furniture and large quantities of blood; Soranzo threw Annabella about the stage by her hair; and the final scene’s bloodbath (of which more shortly) saw pools of blood pumped up from under the stage alongside the gouged eyes and skewered heart held aloft.

The frustration here was that Michael Longhurst’s production sacrificed a certain amount of subtlety, intelligence and sense in its pursuit of spectacle, instead taking a route usually reserved for productions of Titus (a play clearly referenced here in the staging of the final banquet) in which directors plump for the easy option of laughter rather than attempting to explore what the absurdity and undermining of propriety lend to the tragedy of the climax. To have Max Bennett’s Giovanni tooting on party whistles, cackling and thumping his chest defused tension and allowed the audience to breathe, but sacrificed the stakes. This production was as quick to forget its butchered Annabella as Giovanni himself.

Laughter was used more effectively earlier in a production that gave a clear and energetic account of the play, and the standout performance by far was James Garnon’s Bergetto. With anachronistically shocked hair and a vocal performance that bordered on shouting, this Bergetto was socially unaware rather than simply foolish, though certainly not mentally challenged to the extent I have seen in previous productions. The treading of a fine line here allowed Bergetto to be genuinely hysterical, particularly as he anticipated the consequences of his uncle reading the letter he had just brazenly presented or when curling up fearfully in the lap of an audience member, but also moving in his awkward attempts to approach Alice Haig’s Philotis. Garnon expertly captured the offhand, obliviously insulting tone throughout, puncturing the severity of scenes and winning audience affections, allowing the sudden turn of his accidental murder (performed in total blackout, with lanterns provided by his would-be rescuers) to have real emotional impact. As his half-knowing, half-similarly childish sidekick Poggio, Dean Nolan ramped up the comedy, terrifying audience members by implying he was about to leap on them and permanently shielding his unfortunate master.

The play’s first half was the stronger in its literate establishment of the key debates. Michael Gould was a tremendous Friar Bonaventura, uncompromising in his castigation of Giovanni but particularly potent in his terrorising of Annabella. As the onstage candles were extinguished, the Friar sat with Fiona Button’s Annabella, leaning into her and growing to a roar as he outlined the terrors of Hell, leaving her a shaking wreck. His debates with Giovanni also showed Bennett at his best, this Giovanni adopting from the start an arrogant, self-serving cleverness, obstinate to rebuttal and quickly articulate in defending his own position.

That Bennett rarely deviated from this mode rendered Giovanni’s development in this production rather static, and more generally I found the smugness of the two leads unpalatable. While the intensity of their initial declarations of love was compelling and charged (a pin drop could have been heard following Giovanni’s first admission), the central relationship never really recovered from the self-absorption depicted in the on-stage naked sex scene. While Annabella’s refusal of Soranzo is necessarily somewhat comic, her utter gleefulness felt unusually cruel, and Giovanni’s continued arrogance to all around him rendered him entirely, perhaps deliberately, unsympathetic. However, the second half at least saw Button come into her own. Thrown horrifically around the stage by Stefano Braschi’s Soranzo, Annabella became fearless, daring her husband to carry out his threats and forcing him to listen to the described wonders of her baby’s father. Complex and conflicted, Button’s Annabella attempted to mediate guilt, physical violence and uncontrollable passion.

It was an enormous shame, then, that the production concluded with Giovanni channelling Carrie and Jack Torrance as a leering, blood-drenched monster. While the brutal and sudden murder of Annabella was effectively horrific, Giovanni first holding the knife up for the audience to see as he kissed his sister before plunging it several times into her belly, the moment (and her condemnation of him) were passed over too quickly, and replaced by Giovanni singing a perverted ‘Happy Birthday’ to Soranzo and other shocked guests wearing party hats. All focus was on the men rather than on the effect on the women, with the sole exception of Putana being exhibited briefly with her eyes gouged out, and the climactic violence failed to engage with the complexity of Giovanni’s twisted declarations of love and ownership.

Far more effective was the play’s second revenge plot. Philip Cumbus’s Vasquez and Noma Dumezweni’s Hippolita danced circles around one another as they developed their plans, passing a candelabra back and forth as each in turn took charge of the moment. Dumezweni in particular showed fantastic range, moving from screamed recriminations to sonorous, measured planning, to a provocative and frenetic masked dance sequence at Soranzo’s wedding. Cumbus’s, by contrast, was laconic and watchful, occupying the space of his female victims and slowly drawing confidences from them. His emphatic but undemonstrative delivery brilliantly undermined Hippolita’s melodramatics at the wedding, muting and mocking her bravado and then her death throes in a powerful display of thwarted ambition and complacent misogyny. With Putana he was even more creepy, bringing her from tears to relieved laughter and reassuring embraces before ordering her eyes gouged out.

The ensemble was generally strong. Sam Cox offered an amusingly exasperated Donado, perhaps even channeling a bit of Tywin Lannister in his humourless despair over the younger generation. Edward Peel was dignified as Florio, even when provoked into nearly punching Bergetto. Morag Siller borrowed liberally from presentations of Shakespeare’s Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, giggling and gossiping with her charge and covering for the young lovers. And Daniel Rabin managed to make sense of the difficult, obscure role of Richardetto, maintaining composure even as his attempts to gain purchase on the plot collapsed.

There were two productions in competition here: an intelligent, complex drama about the politics of control and sex, with Hippolita and Vasquez, Soranzo and Annabella, and Bergetto and Philotis at its heart. And then there was a black comedy of hubristic excess, centred around Giovanni’s diffident and then aggressive performance, the siblings’ disdain for others and the director’s striving after spectacle. It’s disappointing that the production finished as the latter, as the former was much more interesting, but an energetic cast carried the whole.

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