ART Devil incarnate
HILARY SPURLING
It is so seldom that the National Theatre has appeared in a great play, and so long since they last performed one with any special excellence, that one is scarcely prepared for the blazing impact of Webster's The-White Devil. Piero Gherardi has set the play against a gigantic wall of soft, crumbling, yellow stone ; and, in the opening moments of Frank Dunlop's production, it yields that 'violent shock of pleasure' which Rilke felt on first confronting the vast, pocked and pitted, weed-grown Roman wall of the ruined theatre at Orange.
Even Mr Gherardi can scarcely recreate the grandeur of an open amphitheatre— 'this was the mighty, all-disguising antique mask, behind which the universe condensed into a face'—inside the proscenium arch at the Old Vic. But he has built a triple row of slabs between which courtiers sidle in strange and brilliant dresses, carrying sly, slit-eyed paper masks, peering from ledges, slithering into or darting out from gaps. Edward Petherbridge, marvellously morose as Lodovico, discusses his banishment—`I'll make Italian cut-works in their guts / If ever I return'—sardonically in hisses. It is one of those informative, introductory scenes which are generally so tedious to sit through and doubtless perilous to perform, but which here communicates urgency, constraint and heat, a sense of prying ears and a mood of sleepy, vindictive turpitude.
Perhaps only an Italian could have designed such a setting for Webster—and yet, having once seen The White Devil in sun- light, it will be uncommonly hard to watch the play put back again into the dank and murky closets usually reserved for Jacobean tragedy. It is not simply that an abstract use of light and mass is relieved by sumptuous colour—black, white and scarlet robes, for instance, against a yellow ground—nor even that this setting lends itself so well to the ornate assassinations which were a speciality of the time. Isabella dies, attended by her household and watched from a magician's lair by her husband (who engineered the murder), by kissing his poisoned, painted lips in token of devotion to his statue ; this mimed death—the duchess sinking within her stiff, white, lacy draperies, convulsed silently and briefly like an insect trapped inside a muslin net—has a masque-like, for- mal beauty which perfectly conveys why Bracciano should take such pleasure in the assassin's art. Camillo's murder, accom- plished during a drunken bout across a vault- ing horse, has the same delicacy : the squalor implicit in the lines, and the last sharp crack of broken bone, contrast strangely with the slow, graceful movements of the gym- nasts, who seem to hover above the gleam- ing leather horse, coiling and uncoiling slug- gishly as in a dream.
The scene was rehearsed by Claude Chag- rin, and no one 'could have done it quaint- lier', as Lodovico says with pride of his own masterpiece, on strangling Bracciano ; all three murders achieve—in wholly contem- porary terms—the breathtaking effect whfch these gory episodes must once have held for Jacobean audiences. But what is most exhilarating about the austerity of this pro- duotiots is the-way in which it focuses atter
tion, on the architectural splendours of the plot as on the minutiae of feeling. Much the same thing has happened this summer at Stratford, where the Royal Shakespeare Company, using a bare stage, high screens which frame the action, luxurious colour and severely formal groupings, achieve the same clarity and formidable concentration.
What we seem to be watching in both theatres is the evolution of an abstract style —and, though one might suppose that such a style would be obtrusive, or at any rate distracting, in fact it has so far proved the opposite. By eliminating the clutter of anachronistic, naturalistic business which has accumulated down the years, it both strengthens and enhances the peculiar flavour of each play ; it works as well for the elusive, wintry consolations of Shakespeare's last plays or for Middleton's harsh realism in Women Beware Women at Stratford, as, in last week's production, for the emotional subtlety and radiance of Webster.
Which demonstrates at the very least a singular flexibility, since it is hard to imagine two playwrights reaching more different con- clusions than Middleton and Webster, work- ing from precisely similar material—for the Francisco de Medici, Isabella's brother, who takes such a grim revenge on the white devil is the same Duke of Florence whose own marriage, to another 'famous Venetian Cur- tizan', ends horribly in Women Beware Women. Vittoria Corombona and Bianca Capello, Webster's heroine and Middleton's, who reached the London stage probably within a few years of one another, must have pursued parallel careers in fact at roughly the same time. The two playwrights are alike only in their absolute honesty, and perhaps in their feeling for women—'N'er trust them. They'll remarry / Ere the worm pierce your winding sheet, ere the spider / Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs'. Middleton's verse is never of this order, though he has something of the same hard compassion for Bianca who, like Vittoria, is hounded to her death in a world of cruel, grasping men.
But Women Beware Women has no trace of Webster's strange, equivocal attitude towards his characters ; and it is curious to compare the suave, silken villainy of Brew- ster Mason's Duke, who bestrode that pro- duction like a colossus, with John Moffatt who bestrides this one as Cardinal Monti- celso. Seldom can a Renaissance potentate have seemed so indubitably risen from the dead—in more senses than one, since this grave and dangerous Cardinal carries, thrust forward, a face of such frightful pallor that it might as well be a dead man's head, ban- daged in scarlet. It is a grotesque face- grey-green, with a small frown tweaked up like a wrinkle in raised pastry—and yet some- how it conveys both an extraordinary purity of passion, and a dreadful sense of strain: `Dost thou imagine thou can'st slide on blood/And not be tainted . . .?'
We catch a glimpse of what underlies this face in the Cardinal's tirade. at Vittoria's the e litietl are theasaed, the delivery urbane, even mellifluous, and the sense con- veyed—in odd, stifled gulps and spasmodic, circling movements—is of something fero- oious, fighting to break out, something far more monstrous than puritanical disgust a an adulterous whore. There is the same ten sion, between overwrought nerves and iro will, in his scenes with the Duke, and wi Lodovico after the Cardinal's spectacula entry as Pope. It is a profoundly ambiguou performance—ambiguous in the way tha Webster's characters often are, shifty, dis connected, liable to sudden alteratio between one meeting and the next, so tha, we see them only partially, in changin lights, as we see other people in ordinary lite.
There are further treasures in this produ.- tion, chief among them Derek Godfrey, sharp. black, malevolent and mercurial as Bra,- ciano, and Edward Woodward's tart, loud Flamineo. Mr Woodward flourishes mightil, like a fat root in Webster's sexual under. growth, on the juicy innuendo, the intellec- tual clarity and laconic wit of this immensely sympathetic villain. Geraldine McEwan 's Vittoria is less successful though, at any rat- in the first half of the play, she looks super —naked arms and back, small vicious head framed in a great, serpentine, green, lami- nated ruff. But this Vittoria is at once too pale and too clear-cut ; she is whorish from the start, with none of those flashes of gaiety that glancing, startling sweetness which mak Webster's two great heroines so richly enig matic. Miss McEwan is not helped by a absurdly inappropriate and unbecomin costume in the last two acts—cropped hair lace jacket and a pair of thighboots—no by the mismanagement of the last trip massacre, staged with a crude naturalism which destroys both the emotional an' aesthetic impact of this scene. Benjami Whitrow shines briefly—disturbingly young and fly, and yet with a horrid shamblin impotence—as the cuckolded Camillo ; Jan Wenham is sad and flinty as the pious Isabella and Anthony Nicholls properl, sedate as the Duke of Florence.
But the force of Mr Dunlop's magnificen production lies in its passion, lucidity a coherence. What sticks in the mind is no' the play's fiendishly quaint murders, not di feckless rapacity nor even the misery an' fear of its protagonists, but rather that subtle tragic distillation which Rilke sensed in th theatre at Orange: That hour, as I reali now, shut me for ever out of our theatres What should I do there? What should 1 before a stage on which this wall . . . h been demolished, because we no longer has• the power to press the action, like a g through its hard mask, to come forth in fu heavy oil-drops?'
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