Theatre review: Women Beware Women

Seeing two Shakespeare productions in a row isn't that unusual, especially once the summer season kicks off; two Middletons (Thomas, not Kate and Pippa) is rarer. Women Beware Women concludes the current Swanamaker season in a production by Amy Hodge that's fully aware of the potential for the play to chime with #MeToo, and gives Joanna Scotcher's design a 1980s aesthetic that nods at a time a lot of current cases date back to. The Florentine court becomes a gilded Art Deco hotel where Leantio (Paul Adeyefa) brings his new wife Bianca (Thalissa Teixeira,) only to immediately demand she be hidden away from public view because their elopement is still a dangerous secret. But on a public walkabout the Duke (Simon Kunz) spots Bianca at her window, and decides he must have her. Enter Livia (Tara Fitzgerald,) who's got a plan to get the Duke access to her in return for her own advancement.

But Livia also manipulates women much closer to home: Her brother Hippolito (Daon Broni) is in lust with their niece Isabella (Olivia Vinall,) who's disgusted at the suggestion of incest. So Livia "confides" in her a story that they're not really blood relatives, leaving the way clear for her uncle to seduce her.

Dating from later in his career than The Revenger's Tragedy, Women Beware Women shares some common threads beyond the Italian court setting, like Middleton's generally misanthropic attitude - the only character not to end up corrupted is, unusually for a play of the time, Stephanie Jacob's Cardinal. There's a lot of partying in the face of destruction, with the cast singing traditional Jacobean ballads like Heaven 17's "Temptation" between scenes, and Fitzgerald marshalls the carnage like a husky-voiced soap villain, her twice-widowed Livia suggesting she ruins people's lives more out of boredom than malice.

Less successful is the balance between the serious, and still-current issues of gender inequality the play touches on, and the arch way it does it. Hodge deals most effectively with the extremes: the two darkest scenes of the young women being abused are striking, with a highly stylised game of chess Livia uses to distract Leantio's mother (Jacob) while the Duke rapes her daughter-in-law; and a coldly matter-of-fact scene of Isabella's prospective husband (Helen Cripps) inspecting her virginity and bringing his friend (Rachael Spence) along to take a look. Although the latter scene still works, it does show that gender-blind casting can have its downside: While casting women as the young men nods at the conceit of casting women as boys and emphasises that they're little more than entitled children, on the other hand it does undermine the overall image of women being pawns in a man's world.

At the opposite end of the scale the finale full of elaborate murders is also a highlight in a completely different, high-camp way, most memorably featuring Fitzgerald getting lowered onto the stage on a swing, only to get taken out by poisoned incense. But in the moments between the extremes the production doesn't fare quite as well, and with all the elaborate murders saved for the final scene it feels like it takes a while to get there. A curate's egg of striking moments standing out from convoluted plotting.

Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton is booking in repertory until the 18th of April at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.