In Francis Beaumont’s
The London Merchant, Jasper (Kirill Chernyshenko) is in love with his master’s daughter Luce (Anna Vardevanian,) but their plans to elope are thwarted at every turn by both her parents and his. Except the biggest obstacle to their being together isn’t actually a part of their own story, because
The London Merchant doesn’t exist, except as the play-within-a-play that gets disrupted in Beaumont’s proto-postmodernist
The Knight of the Burning Pestle. When I saw
the Swanamaker production a few years ago I loved its inspired, multi-layered silliness and the feeling that the play was centuries ahead of its time so much I
went back for seconds, which made the prospect of director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, a team who deliver eccentric and chaotic results at the best of times, tackling it something to look forward to.
