THE WHITE DEVIL. To 10 May.
Colchester
THE WHITE DEVIL
by John Webster
Mercury Theatre To 10 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 2.30pm 1,3,8 May
BSL Signed 8 May eve
Runs 3hr One interval
TICKETS: 01206 573948
boxoffice@mercurytheatre.co.uk
Talkback post-show 30 April
Review: Timothy Ramsden
A visually splendid, fast-moving Pulp Fiction of the Jacobean theatre.Immense gloomy spaces, punctuated only by wood frames, halfway between Renaissance palace arches and prehistoric trilithons, darkness from which characters emerge, creating a near-cinematic fluidity of action for Webster’s sour, tragic close-ups.
Characters flash vividly before us a few moments then disappear with an instability which doesn’t need the script’s magic device to show the entirely innocent Camillo cold-bloodedly murdered to leave his widow Vittoria free for Lord Brachiano. In this vividly inconsequential style it’s natural a swordplay tournament turns with a sudden shock into the first leg of the tortured murder of Brachiano himself. Plotting’s cut back: horrific events speak for themselves in the visual equivalent of sudden screams and screeching of strangulated voices.
Creeping around this courtly half-world is Toby Longworth’s sinister dispenser of poisons and deadly powders.Religion looks feebly on in the silent figure of a dying Pope, encased in glass till Dr Julio blows a dusty death over him, hinting that Gregory Floy’s Monticelso ascends to the papacy by foul means.
In this world Cornelia, mother to villainy but the soul of honesty, cannot survive. Christine Absalom, repeatedly seen in silent prayer; begins speaking sharply up for honesty, but ends in distraction, hauntingly portrayed in a crazed song including the couplet appropriated for The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, whose view of Webster as ‘much possessed by death’ and seeing ‘the skull beneath the skin’ might be an epigraph for David Hunt’s production.
All that’s lacking is the full poetic force of Webster’s verse, proclaiming ‘Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright/That looked-to near have neither heat nor light’. However impressive the staging, poetic drama presents character through words. The paradoxically-named white devil herself, the flamboyantly beautiful Vittoria is given strong physicality by Katy Stephens, but lacks a commanding vocal glory.
Her manipulative brother Flamineo is a rough-edged Celt – sure sign stereotype of brutality – but swallows and spits the lines: his announcement of his death wound – ‘I have caught an everlasting cold’ goes for little. It’s not a mater of isolated declamation: this is music and tunes need singing out as well as to be characterised.
Cornelia: Christine Absalom
Brachiano: Ignatius Anthony
Zanche: Jacqueline Boatswain
Gasparo: Tony Casement
Monticelso: Gregory Floy
Giovanni: Kerrie Forster/Jacob Robinson
Camillo: Tim Freeman
Flamineo: Colm Gormley
Isabella: Gina Isaac
Dr Julio: Toby Longworth
Marcello: Andrew Lovern
Francisco: Andrew Maud
Ludovico: Philip Ralph
Vittoria: Katy Stephens
with Steve Desmond, Gerry McKee, Matthew Woods, Nicholas Waters
Director: David Hunt
Designer: Michael Vale
Lighting: Tim Skelly
Composer: Ian Wellens
Associate director, Voice, Text: Craig Bacon
Fight director: Bret Yount
Magic advisor: Michael J Fitch
2003-05-05 11:43:14