Jodie Whittaker’s Duchess of Malfi strides on to the stage in a scarlet cocktail dress and confidently takes hold of a standing mic to sing about desire. She then pours herself a strong drink and waits for her two madly controlling brothers to express their disapproval — which they duly do, volubly and at length. It’s a promising start to Zinnie Harris’s The Duchess (of Malfi), first seen in 2019, which wrests John Webster’s blood-soaked tragedy from the 17th century and relocates it loosely in the early 1960s. Sadly, what follows is a muddle.
There’s potential in a response to the Jacobean original from a female perspective: a chance to give the duchess greater interiority and an opportunity to examine the enduring nature of misogyny and violence. With a setting evoking the Sixties, it could make sense that the duchess’s weirdly possessive brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, would panic at the prospect of greater liberation for women.
But the result is an oddly patchy affair that cleaves closely to Webster’s plot without bedding it into the new context. We don’t get much closer to the duchess and the characters seem to be floating free: the hierarchy that determines their actions in Webster’s time no longer fits and there’s no sense of another society’s pressures to replace it.
That might matter less if the focus were more psychological. Here we see the misogyny but we get no deeper into what drives it: Paul Ready’s Cardinal is an ice-cold sadist and Rory Fleck Byrne’s Ferdinand is snake-mad from the get-go. Harris’s script is brisk and modern, but too often characters flatly state what is going on with them rather than it seeping out of the drama.
Meanwhile Tom Piper’s brutalist set, with its clanging metal walkways, could be a modernist house but also has the feel of an institution, suggesting that society is a prison — or that the whole thing may be unrolling in a psychiatric hospital. Interesting ideas both — the 1960s was a period of disturbing psychological experimentation — but again they don’t feel explored.
There are moving scenes in Harris’s production. The female characters occasionally express their feelings in song, as if needing to break out of the structure of the tragedy to speak freely. The torture of the duchess evokes war crimes; her slaughter, along with that of her maid and daughter, leaves three broken female bodies on a dirty floor — a piteous sight that speaks for so many domestic murders. They then gently rouse one another to haunt the men, becoming a timeless chorus of battered women. And there’s a touching ending that suggests a path away from toxic masculinity.
But, for all that, and despite Whittaker’s vibrant, warm, determined duchess, it’s an odd, messy affair. It often feels strained, confusing and over-emphatic and, in the end, it fatally misses the tragic power of the original.
★★☆☆☆
To December 20, trafalgartheatre.com
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