Theatre review: The Changeling

Ricky Dukes is a fun director, but he does seem incredibly keen on filling small stages with huge furniture, then letting his casts loose to try and manoeuvre their way around it: In last year's Doctor Faustus it was a maze of big wooden desks that everyone was banging their shins against; for this year's return to The Little with The Changeling they're trying to squeeze around a boardroom table, with Colette O'Rourke's Beatrice-Joanna at one point getting stuck when her hooped wedding dress swallowed an office chair. I haven’t seen Succession (it’s not on any of my streaming services, I’m not being a hipster about it,) but I assume that like a lot of recent shows that’s the visual reference that Sorcha Corcoran’s design is making.

It’s a theme that doesn’t really seem to actually mean much to the story, and its clumsiness is one of the few things that threatens to derail a production that otherwise goes for Dukes’ tried and tested technique when dealing with the more demented end of Jacobethan drama: To lean into it and, if anything, up the ante.

Beatrice-Joanna is the frankly unpleasant anti-heroine of Middleton and Rowley’s tragedy, who’s been promised in marriage to amiable drip Alonzo (Alex Bird.) Knowing that her mother’s steward is obsessed with her, she encourages De Flores (Jamie O’Neill) to murder her fiancé, intimating that there’s another man she’d rather be with. In fact she’s repulsed by De Flores and his facial disfigurement, and after he does the deed reveals that she actually meant she wanted to marry Alsemero (Mylo McDonald.) But after years of being belittled De Flores has had enough, and demands Beatrice-Joanna’s virginity as payment.

Jacobean tragedies each seem to have their own brand of insanity, and part of what makes The Changeling stand out is literal insanity: As collaborations go, it does give the distinct impression that each writer had no idea what the other was doing, as Rowley’s contribution is an almost entirely unconnected subplot about an insane asylum. Dukes goes for the option of streamlining the action by sticking to the De Flores / Beatrice-Joanna plot and getting rid of the other one entirely: The occasional diversions to the madhouse are replaced by a trio of “Patients” (Hamish Somers, Kiera Murray and Mikko Juan) singing weird, country-tinged songs by Bobby Locke that repeat crucial lines in an increasingly deranged chorus.

It leaves the action free to enjoy the way Middleton’s part of the story is hardly short of surreal touches itself: After their wedding, Alsemero turns out to be an all-powerful alchemist who can tell if a woman’s a virgin through, among other things, her sneezes, leading to a bed trick involving flirty-but-actually-virginal maid Diaphanta (Henrietta Rhodes,) the titular changeling (in one of the more tenuous play titles in the British theatre canon until Simon Stephens came along.) Then there’s my personal favourite, the murderous central pair reacting to Diaphanta being slightly late to an appointment by setting the house on fire.

Dukes overdoes the gag of adding a bit of modern-day swearing into the Jacobean text, but his technique of throwing the kitchen sink at a story makes the sheer oddity of this part of the play come out more clearly than I think I’ve ever seen it before – there’s murders done with water-pistols, sing-alongs and balloons bouncing around the audience. Comedy comes everywhere from the more baroque plot twists, all the way down to the bathos of Alonzo’s brother Tomazo (Olsen Elezi) stalking the corridors seeking revenge, only to basically shrug and say “fair enough” when fate catches up to the murderers before he can. But there’s also a nicely defined arc to the way O'Rourke and O’Neill go from enemies to an unholy alliance that traps and dooms them. Now, if only Dukes could let his actors actually move freely around the stage next time.

The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley is booking until the 28th of October at Southwark Playhouse Borough’s Little Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Charles Flint.