'’Tis Pity She’s a Whore'

The spring season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this year looks pretty interesting, at least on paper, so Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I decided to increase our theater activities by four and subscribe. The first offering was John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, staged at the Harvey Theatre by Cheek by Jowl, the innovative British company directed by Declan Donnellan. We caught the evening performance on Wednesday, 28 March.

Now, going into this production, I had some reservations, including the important fact that I just don’t like Jacobean drama, especially the tragedies. ’Tis Pity, which was published in 1633 and may have been first performed as early as 1629, is among the grimmest and most dismal plays I’ve ever seen or read (not to mention one of the bloodiest), and I’ve seen at least two productions of it before this one. I also saw Cheek by Jowl stage The Duchess of Malfi, another bloody Jacobean stomach-churner, at BAM back in 1995. And that raises another problem I had with this production before I walked in the theater doors: I’ve seen a couple of Cheek by Jowl’s performances and haven’t liked them very much. Malfi turned into a play about moving a chair! I recorded that I found the production “self-indulgent and pretentious.” (I also saw their 1998 staging of Much Ado About Nothing, but I don’t remember much about the show. I did, however, stop going to Cheek by Jowl after that, it seems.) On the other hand, however, Diana had never seen the play, and from a financial point of view, we needed to book four shows at BAM to qualify for the subscription discount, and there were only four plays on offer—so it was either see ’Tis Pity again, or pay full freight for the other performances. So, there I was.

I know that’s not an auspicious motivation for being in the audience of a piece of theater. You never know, though: surprises do happen.

’Tis Pity She's a Whore tells the tale of an incestuous love between Giovanni and his sister Annabella, the children of the wealthy Florio, that ends in disaster and death. (Some critics have seen Ford’s play as a commentary on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. There are also allusions to both Hamlet and Othello in the story and characters, but without the subtleties of Shakespeare’s humanity or his poetry. There are no great lines in ’Tis Pity.) Set in Parma, Italy, the story takes place against a background of lust, vengeance, and greed that ends in a gruesome bloodbath. There are many subplots in the original text, the most important of which concerns Hippolita, the betrayed and vengeful lover of one of Annabella's suitors, Soranzo. When Annabella becomes pregnant by Giovanni, the Friar convinces her to marry Soranzo to hide her scandal. Hippolita, who dispensed with a husband for Soranzo, become irreconcilably jealous and plots to have her former lover killed. Soranzo’s servant Vasques turns the tables on her, however, and she drinks her own poison, meant for Soranzo. (There are more of those little plots, but Donnellan cut the others out.) When Soranzo discovers Annabella’s pregnancy, however, the over-loyal Vasques tries to uncover the identity of Annabella’s lover. She won’t reveal her secret to her husband so Soranzo plots revenge, to take place at his birthday celebration among all the celebrities of Parma. Giovanni, however, beats Soranzo to the punch and dispatches Annabella in the most gruesome manner. The play’s treatment of the incest made it one of the most controversial works in English literature. The play was omitted from a 19th-century collection of Ford's plays; its title has often been changed to something euphemistic such as Giovanni and Annabella, The Brother and Sister, or the truncated ’Tis Pity. Until well into the 20th century, critics were severe in their condemnations. The subject matter offended them, as did Ford's failure to condemn Giovanni.

The Cheek by Jowl production, designed in modern dress, has been on tour since last November, so far having played in Paris, Sidney, and a number of cities in the U.K., including London, Cambridge, and Oxford. After Brooklyn, ’Tis Pity, which ran at BAM from 20 to 31 March, goes on to Madrid. The company was started in 1981 by Donnellan, who directs most of the productions (all the ones I’ve seen), and Nick Ormerod, the company’s designer. (The company’s name comes from a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Donnellan says that it “enshrines the company's devotion to the classics.”) The troupe, though London-based, is international, working in English, French, Spanish, and Russian, and they tour prodigiously—over 301 cities in 40 countries around the globe. Their manifesto is “to re-examine classical texts, avoiding directorial and design concepts, and to focus on the actor's art.” Donnellan says of this ’Tis Pity that “we never enter a play with ‘ideas.’ This is just how ’Tis Pity seems to have come out this time . . . .” The current production isn’t the first time Donnellan’s staged Ford’s tragedy: In 1980, the year before he and Ormerod formed their company, he directed another modern-dress performance of the play in London which became the launching pad for Cheek by Jowl.

Donnellan, who’s started a Russian company in Moscow and has worked for such illustrious troupes as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and the Moscow Art Theater, is best known for stripping his productions down to their basic impact. He doesn’t rip the heart out the way Richard Maxwell did in his recent adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays (see my ROT report on 14 March), but he goes straight for the emotional jugular. Ormerod, too, is a minimalist: his sets present only what the spectators need to see what’s happening and the actors to do their business, but little more. (The pair say that the settings aren’t conceived until rehearsals are underway, but Ormerod interprets what the actors and Donnellan devise and his style is mostly spare.) My own sense of the productions I’d seen before is that this impels Cheek by Jowl to speed through the plays as if propelled by adrenaline. They take little time, it seems to me, either to let the emotions and actions communicate to the audience, or to motivate the characters. The result for me has been a flat, shallow performance, even if it’s technically proficient. ’Tis Pity, for example, runs an intermissionless hour and fifty-five minutes, which is short for a Jacobean play. I don’t know how long the play regularly runs, probably well over two hours, or exactly how much Cheek by Jowl has cut from the text, but it suggests to me that they’ve probably shaved ten minutes or more off the presentation by pacing alone. (I can’t prove this, but it’s my sense of things. I’d have to reread the text to be sure, but Donnellan’s cut at least one subplot and the characters involved in it—Jacobean plays are usually chockablock with elaborate intrigues and conspiracies—as the company’s done in the past.)

This particular play may have benefitted from both the trimming and the rapid performance. Diana remarked, when I pointed this out, that otherwise the play would have been tedious. (I’d have used a stronger adjective myself, more like deadly or bleak, but I’ll accept tedious for now.) As it was presented, though, Diana found the production enjoyable and interesting. She, of course, had no expectations since she’d never seen the play before and hadn’t read any reviews to prejudice her opinion. (In contrast to Ben Brantley’s prediction that Donnellan’s interpretation “would bewilder those who don’t know” the play, Diana’s experience seems to have benefitted from the pruning.) The audience’s response at the end was enthusiastic, though there were large sections of the auditorium empty, suggesting possibly that other BAM supporters rejected the play based on its rep, and one or two left during the performance (though I can’t be sure why, of course—the subject matter of the play can be disquieting).

Ormerod’s setting for the production is the bedroom of Annabella, all in reds and washed with red light. (The lighting was designed by Judith Powell.) The costumes (also by Ormerod) are essentially di-chromatic—black and white—with splashes of bright red such as in the dress of one partygoer at the wedding and again at a birthday gala, and the sash of the cardinal at the birthday. This color scheme doesn’t take into account the pink flesh if the nudity—full dorsal when it occurs—and near nudity—many of the men bare their chests at the drop of a . . . well, shirt—that Donnellan’s included in the production. The room’s basically a rectangle, with a door to the corridor up right and an en suite bathroom up left. The perimeter of the room is lined with bits and pieces—furniture, discarded clothing, pillows, a bean-bag chair, and so on, all shades of red—with a wide path cleared around the middle. It looks like a teenaged girl’s room, with various posters on the up-stage wall (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the cable vampire-and-werewolf series True Blood, Dial M for Murder), and a messy bed—red sheets, to be sure—in the center of the stage. It’s the center of the action, too: many of the scenes take place on or near the bed. Neither Donnellan nor Ormerod can be accused here of being too subtle with their symbolism: the reds evoke both blood and illicit sex; the bare skin reminds us, as if we need the reminder, that this is a play about sex; and the bed . . . well, it speaks for itself, doesn’t it. (That scarlet dress, by the way, is worn by the actress who also plays Annabella’s enabling maid Putana, whose name means ‘whore’ in Italian. Coincidence?) The stage is relatively dimly lit as if the curtains are always closed and the lights are all low wattage—except the bright white-tiled bathroom (where much of the ghastly business is done—a death by poison, a throat-slitting, and the gouging out of Annabella’s beating heart): when the door opens, the light in there is very bright. No matter where Ford set his scenes, Cheek by Jowl’s whole production takes place in Annabella’s bedroom and everyone’s welcome: father, brother-lover, suitors, husband, friar, party guests, servants—whoever. Is this because Annabella’s the whore of the title?

Aside from the sped-up, unsubtle performance style which is the hallmark of the Cheek by Jowl shows I’ve seen, Donnellan has incorporated some other stylistic elements in ’Tis Pity. Starting with the opening moment, the cast breaks into group dance of various types, beginning with that looks like techno but later also includes some disco-inspired moves and a tarantella. (The music and sound are created by Nick Powell and the “movement” is staged by associate director Jane Gibson.) Sometimes the dancing is related to the scene, like the wedding or birthday celebrations, but other times it’s gratuitous. Another of Donnellan’s stylized insertions is to have the whole cast on stage for many scenes, sitting or standing silently around the periphery of the room. The meaning of this wasn’t entirely clear to me; it may be a manifestation of Donnellan’s idea that everyone’s collectively guilty of the transgressions that are playing out or an enforced contrast of the pure (though forbidden) love of Annabella and Giovanni with the corruption of the society than condemns them. Occasionally, only one intruding character is present, such as the servant Vasques or, frequently, Giovanni, who witness moments in which they aren’t actually involved. Then, of course, is the nudity I mentioned earlier—certainly something that wouldn’t have occurred to Ford and his company in Renaissance England. (There’s even a leather-clad male stripper, not a character in Ford’s text, who first bites out the tongue of the blabbermouth maid Putana, then takes her moaning body into the well-used bathroom to kill her. It’s hard to conceive of topping the Grand Guignol of Ford’s original, but this emendation manages to.) As for the persistent criticism that Ford doesn’t condemn Annabella or Giovanni for breaking the taboos, Donnellan’s cut the final line in which Annabella’s reviled with the title sentence, “’Tis pity she’s a whore,” but he does add the ominous whine of police sirens approaching Florio’s house, promising some kind of consequences, however ambiguous. I won’t say I truly enjoyed all this, theatrically speaking, of course, but it can be said that Donnellan’s additions and adjustments energized this grinding play. On its own, that’s a benefit, but I also can’t say that it added anything to the play’s point or meaning for me. What’s that expression? You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity is a pig with lipstick.

I’ve already characterized the performances in general: unsubtle, superficial, and fast-paced. Those are all clearly directorial choices since they were universal and echoes of past productions I’ve seen. Though none of the actors stumbled or tripped over the imposed style, none really stood out, either. Despite the implications of the play’s title, Lydia Wilson’s Annabella is believably naïve and credulous, a very young woman, older than Juliet, but an adolescent nonetheless. Ford wrote her as innocent or at least disingenuous, but Wilson is more reckless and willful, which works in the modern setting. I didn’t have any problem believing that Giovanni could convince her to succumb to their mutual attraction and that she could believe their passion was pure and innocent even if no one else ever would. Jack Gordon’s Giovanni is totally narcissistic and prone to sophistry, including the self-deluding kind. He’s too old—a university student home from his studies (more Hamlet’s age than Romeo’s)—to be entirely innocent, but he knows how to manipulate his own mind as well as others’ to make it seem that what he wants is natural and right, even though he certainly knows how destructive it will end up being. (Brantley calls the character “Byronic,” which may be apt, what with Gordon’s dark, curly mop—what we used to call a “white afro.”) He even lets the Friar (played at this performance by Ryan Ellsworth) think that the priest has convinced him to give up his pursuit of Annabella when he has no intention of doing that. Gordon’s a very clever college boy who knows he’s smart, but isn’t wise: he has all the answers. Until he doesn’t. But while both siblings say all the right words—Annabella, after she marries Soranzo (a stalwart but ego-driven Jack Hawkins) and he learns of her pregnancy, tries to argue him into accepting both her and her child—but they obviously never learn anything along the way. Wilson and Gordon both rush headlong toward their fates so inexorably that they never take a moment to see what’s happening to them. As much as this is Donnellan’s responsibility, the actors never find a way even to suggest their characters know what they’re getting into. When the director says he doesn’t go into a play “with ‘ideas,’” maybe this is what results. That’s the heart of the problem I have with Cheek by Jowl’s performance style. I have no doubt that these actors can all do the Stanislavsky bit with credibility—Wilson and, especially, Gordon have a slew of impressive credits and a few films (where grounded Realism is usually the standard), for instance—but this company’s technique doesn’t allow it. And yet, this isn’t Brechtian distancing or some other obviously un-realistic or anti-realistic performance style—it’s some compromise of the two poles: neither fish nor fowl. It wasn’t unbearable, but it wasn’t illuminating, either. I fall back on my criteria for good theater: it has to do more than tell a story and it has to be theatrical. Cheek by Jowl is theatrical, though I often think it’s cheaply so, but they seem to be doing little more here than staging (part of) Ford’s tale. If Donnellan developed an “idea,” even if he didn’t start with one, I never found it.

Curiously, the most vibrant performances in Donnellan’s cast come from the actors playing two of the servants. Laurence Spellman’s Vasques, who serves Annabella’s husband Soranzo and isn’t above a little skullduggery and even murder-for-hire (that stripper-assassin is Vasques’s henchman), and Lizzie Hopley’s Putana, who just can’t keep her mouth shut and spills the beans about Annabella’s baby-daddy, both deliver the most complete characterizations on the Harvey stage. They have full personalities—at least as far as this production will allow and their roles provide room for—and they don’t disappear into the background of the lurking circle of family and friends. Spellman has a sepulchral demeanor, kind of a Uriah Heep with brass balls, and I knew whenever he was on stage that something dastardly (yeah, this show calls up archaic words like that) was going on. Hopley’s a bit of a flibbertigibbet with a dark edge: as she tries to help Annabella rationalize her lust for Giovanni: she sounds like a sorority sister just convincing her roommate to go out with the football star.

Calling the interpretation “overheated,” Brantley characterizes it in the New York Times as “seriously overdressed, like a fashion victim begging to be photographed.” He sums up his assessment of the production, as I do mine, by observing that the “trimmings are piled on so heavily that they smother individual characterization.” Elisabeth Vincentelli writes in the New York Post: “Throughout, the show moves with a breathless momentum, while keeping everything in horrifyingly clear focus—like the best nightmares.” Joe Dziemianowicz describes the production as “bold but spare” in the Daily News. In Time Out New York, Helen Shaw dubs the show “disappointingly thin, superficially youthful” and characterizes Donnellan and Ormerod’s “reimagination” as “the fevered product of a goth-adolescent mind” which is “[s]trenuously trying to seem punk rock.” She writes that the staging is “ersatz rebelliousness that defangs the show.” Variety hasn’t reviewed the New York incarnation of the production, but in London, David Benedict said: “the self-conscious execution smothers content, narrative and drama.” He also noted, as I do here, that “the intensity of the emotions comes across but not the moment-to-moment progression of ideas or character.” Benedict’s conclusion sounds like my own assessment of Cheek by Jowl’s work as I’ve experienced it: “Donnellan's extreme directorial gestures are undeniably grand, but shorn of convincing detail, there's too much display, not enough play.”