Theatre review: The Duchess [of Malfi]

Poor the Jodie Whittaker, they keep doing her dirty. I still maintain, based on what I've seen of her in interviews, that she could have been an absolute natural as The Doctor, but she spent her entire run on Doctor Who surrounded by so many companions you could blink and miss her. Now she returns to the stage in one of the most iconic roles in theatre, but in a translation that's neither the original nor quite a reinvention, leaving her flailing in an evening that feels little more than just a bit skewwhiff. Zinnie Harris' play, originally announced under the title The Duchess, had by the time it opened been quietly retitled The Duchess Open Square Brackets of Malfi Close Square Brackets, perhaps to help attract school parties: The website says this play is studied in the A Level English Literature curriculum.

Well frankly it's impressive that Harris' 2019 play is already a school text. I mean it must be, I can't imagine the publicity would suggest it was the case if students were actually meant to be studying the slightly more established John Webster version of The Duchess of Malfi.

The story is certainly Webster's. Whittaker's Duchess is recently widowed from the first marriage that gave her her title. She doesn't fancy another marriage of convenience but she does fancy her steward Antonio (Joel Fry,) whom she marries in secret. And she manages to keep the secret, but not once she's got pregnant and given birth to twins. Now her controlling brothers Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne) and the Cardinal (Paul Ready) enact a sadistic revenge for her daring to take control of her own affairs, attempting to drive her mad and eventually having her murdered.

By far the most distracting thing about the show for me is Harris' new script itself, and the question of why it even exists in the first place. There are a few changes but for the most part this follows Webster almost line-by-line: Although I'm not an expert on the play there are definitely moments where the lines feel like direct paraphrases of Jacobean English. I don't know if they still exist, but when I was growing up there used to be educational texts of Shakespeare plays with the original on the left hand page, and a direct translation into more colloquial English opposite it on the right. The Duchess [of Malfi] feels like it's accidentally staged the right-hand version.

Plot-wise, the changes are minimal, especially in the first half: The Duchess and Antonio's first child is edited out of the story, and instead she has twins straight away, and her secret discovered. The minor role of Delio (Hubert Burton) has been beefed up a bit by conflating him with Julia's cuckolded husband - Harris also makes him overtly in love with Antonio, and tacitly approving of any affairs his wife might have as they both know their marriage of convenience is a failure. Most strangely, Jude Owusu's Bosola has been made much more sympathetic from the outset, very clear about the fact that he's been a victim of circumstance and not an enthusiastic killer, and I'm not sure what's meant to be achieved by making a famously intriguing character less complex.

There are a few bigger plot changes after the interval, mostly involving the barrage of comically over-the-top scenes of grand guignol that tip the play into black farce. The Madame Tussauds display of fake corpses becomes a faked execution video shown to the Duchess, Ferdinand still thinks he's a werewolf but not an inside-out one, and Bosola's failure to save Antonio is changed so it doesn't feel like it needs a sad trombone playing, although the Reservoir Dogs alternative we get doesn't escape the usual audience laughs. Most successfully Julia (Elizabeth Ayodele) still gets despatched via Death By Bible, but in a more effectively grim and brutal way than usual.

But all of these remain, as do the occasional "fuck"s added to the dialogue, the kinds of flourishes that could be, and regularly are, made to productions of the original text, and I remained unsure why Harris, who also directs, hadn't just used that (after the Duchess' death she and Matti Houghton's Cariola haunt the play by playing other minor characters, again something Rebecca Frecknall did with the original text.)

Presumably the update was intended to focus on the men controlling women's bodies and choices, but Rachel Bagshaw's production earlier this year conveyed that more clearly without needing a full rewrite. And although we get a new ending, with the National Theatre in particular leaning recently on classical adaptations that take an element of the original into an entirely new direction, I'm not sure what this minor tinkering with the text is meant to achieve - at worst it felt like Harris might be doing a Julian Fellowes edit for anyone whose education wasn't quite expensive enough to understand long words.

Although the individual performances are good the production as a whole doesn't quite gel. Tom Piper's designs are non-specifically modern dress - I'd say predominantly mid-20th century - with a white clinical feel that focuses in on the Duchess being institutionalised and locked away from the start. These scenes of psychological torture, with oppressive sound by Michael John McCarthy, stark lighting by Ben Ormerod and nightmarish video by Jamie Macdonald, are the most grimly effective, but everything else around them feels less focused.

And where suspension of disbelief can do a lot to square the circle of a modern setting for a Jacobean text, the combination of modern text and visuals adds absurdity to the anachronisms, like the medical diagnoses of Ferdinand's misaligned Humours, or apricots being catnip for pregnant women that instantly sends them into labour. Ultimately though the main problem for me remained the same throughout: The question of what the new text was actually bringing to the party overshadowed anything else going on.

The Duchess [of Malfi] by Zinnie Harris after John Webster is booking until the 20th of December at the Trafalgar Theatre (formerly Trafalgar Studio 1.)

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.