Duchess of Malfi - Royal Shakespeare Co.

DUCHESS OF MALFI - Directed by Maria Aberg
I knew nothing about this story, either about its origins or when or where it had been performed.
We came to it only knowing that it was ‘bloody’. We sat in the upper tier and so we looked directly down onto the stage with the audience on three sides. I gave myself an advantage as we bought the RSC literature on the play and I was able to read some of it while waiting.

The language was simpler than some other performances and it had to be listened to, but it was not as intricate as Shakespearian verse can be. Even so, attention to the actors voices was essential, just to get the drift of the story.

The stage was empty apart from the prone body of a large bovine which was hauled up by a pulley into a more upright position. There it remained and its significance only became apparent during the latter part of the play. Set furniture was minimal with a bed being positioned centrally, but for most of the performance a bare stage where the actors moved freely.

It is a dramatization of a short story by William Painter contained in his collection, The Palace of Pleasure (1566/7). John Webster’s dramatization of it was in 1614. A difference of two reigns, a Tudor Elizabeth to a Jacobean James. And then Webster (it says) ‘seems to be rewriting and challenging the original story’. That’s it in a nutshell, but is anything ever as simple!

The Duchess, played by Joan Iyiola, was superb throughout. She starts by hauling ‘the beast’ higher to more commanding position stage left. We wondered why it was necessary and was it an original idea? There is evidence of macho men in that her soldiers danced for her and for us. It was a demonstrative display of power. I will not give the plot away, but there is a lot of action that follows.

David Ridley, the musical director’s starting point was to identify the gender stereotypes rife in music and to explore ‘gender bias’. It is there in the programme to read.

Academics will have discussed the issues of gender and so I will take a small chunk from the programme and say ‘This is early modern victim-blaming of the highest order, in which men who “should be honoured and praised” are allowed to blame their misconduct on any woman who has stepped out of her “right trade”. Mysogonystic ideas in 1566 adapted for 1614.

The germ of the story is straightforward in that a highborn duchess marries a ‘gentleman’ of lower standing. Fighting and killing are there to be viewed culminating in a blood bath. Well, the animal had to be there for a reason and in ‘the death throes’ of the evening the red stuff oozes from it and across the stage providing a slippery sliding place to kill and be killed.

I expected it to be brutal, vicious and evil. It was all of that, but never sadistic or as cruel as in Titus Andronicus. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but I had to think about it and writing this piece helped me to put it into some sort of perspective. In these days of diversity and gender bashing is it a play for the purist? After all it is theatre.