Theatre review: Venice Preserved

I've seen Venice Preserved once before, but as that particular production was an incoherent car crash that was 50% sales presentation for a property development and 50% people desperately shouting "immersive!" at you while asking for money for four hours, it's probably easiest all round to just treat Thomas Otway's Restoration thriller as completely new to me. Prasanna Puwanarajah directs a mercifully coherent production, although how much sense the plot itself makes remains up for debate. Jaffeir (Michael Grady-Hall) is recruited by his best friend Pierre (Stephen Fewell) to join a bloody rebellion against the corrupt ruling class of Venice; both swear loyalty to the cause, but each also has a personal vendetta against some member of the senate which is the real clincher in wanting to bring them down. In Jaffeir's case, it's his senator father-in-law Priuli (Les Dennis,) who disapproved of the marriage and went out of his way to punish him for it.

This means that as a senator's daughter Jaffeir's wife Belvidera (Jodie McNee) is potentially a valuable bargaining chip, and rather then actually enlist her for the cause he helps the conspirators abduct her as leverage.

When one of her captors sexually assaults Belvidera, Jaffeir's loyalties flip again and after releasing his wife he tries to turn in the conspirators. In fact Jaffeir's story is essentially a couple of hours of betraying the people closest to him then swapping sides; each flip seems to be in response to genuine guilt about the previous betrayal, which in theory means this is a story of a man digging himself an ever deeper hole and morally torturing himself, although in practice he just comes across as an unsympathetic protagonist. Pierre's revolutionary ardour isn't much more convincing, which leaves Belvidera as the sympathetic figure, and McNee does the best out of the underwritten central trio.

Puwanarajah's production plays up the thriller element of the play's conspiracy plot, with James Cotterill's design, Jack Knowles' lighting, George Dennis' sound and Nina Dunn's video and lasers (!) placing the action firmly in the 1980s - specifically the dystopian V for Vendetta 1980s. At times the dance breaks and Princess Diana hairdos feel tacked on but the conceit does more often than not give the show its unique identity and feel justified. The specificity of the setting makes a change from the vague dystopian future the rebels might have been placed in, and there's a prison cell with laser beams for bars. And who doesn't love a prison cell with laser beams for bars?

As a thriller it's definitely a slow burn - apart from multiple back-and-forth betrayals Otway doesn't actually have a lot of plot to get through, and much of the first half involves conspirators giving each other rousing speeches about what they're going to do without actually doing it (the specifics of what's so bad about the senators and how they're going to improve things by replacing them are... vague at best.) But the production has a few nice touches to keep the interest (Jaffeir and Belvidera's escape through the sewers is a great surprise!entrance) and after the interval the action ramps up properly.

But in any part of the story the show-stealer is the subplot involving the personal reason for Pierre to hate the rulers, namely that he's in love with the courtesan Aquilina (Natalie Dew) but can't have her because she's in the employ of senator Antonio (John Hodgkinson.) The way the two of them play their arrangement as S&M role play is a comedy highlight. Hodgkinson's character getting awkwardly aroused when women talk back to him in public leads to by far the most memorable moment of the show, made even more delightful by the fact that the double meaning the word "die" had in the 17th century means Puwanarajah probably hasn't so much put a smutty spin on the scene as pinpointed exactly the filth Otway always intended. Does the play itself feel like a neglected classic? It's too light on plot and characterisation and heavy on rhetoric to deserve more than the occasional revival as a curiosity, and it's certainly hard to see it as a great tragedy. But seen as a slow-burn thriller with the occasional surreal comedy moment it merits a look.

Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway is booking in repertory until the 7th of September at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Maybanks.