'Tis Pity She's A Whore

Cheek by Jowl’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore is a lush, decadent, almost hedonistic interpretation of John Ford’s 1633 play. It is an intelligent cut of a script that is, to be honest, bloated, one that highlights the darkness inherent in the play, even if it does sometimes tend a little towards the camp. I’m sad that I saw this play on its closing night at the Sydney Festival, because I would highly recommend it – not just to fellow Renaissance theatre nerds, but to people who don’t know anything about it.

Actually, this is a perfect play for people whose knowledge of the Renaissance is limited to a little Shakespeare. A lot has been said and written about making Shakespeare accessible, but what this play does is make a play accessible that a lot of audiences don’t normally get the opportunity to see. I love Renaissance theatre – the whole gamut of it, not just Shakespeare – and Cheek by Jowl has a great reputation of bringing innovative productions of neglected plays to the stage. I wrote about their production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling in my Honours thesis. I also wrote about this play in my thesis, and I was very excited to see what Cheek by Jowl would do with it.

It’s not a perfect production. My theatre date and I had a long discussion after the show about the casting in particular. While every actor worked well in their individual role, some of the chemistries were not quite right – between Annabella and Hippolyta, for example, or (and in particular) Annabella and Giovanni. Jack Gordon’s Giovanni was a little too mainstream-ishly Lothario-like for the emo teen queen aesthetic that informed Lydia Wilson’s Annabella. It was easy to believe them as lovers, not so much as brother and sister – and considering how vital this is to the play, this was a bit of a problem.

However, despite these casting issues, Declan Donnellan’s direction was superb. Giovanni is typically played as a romantic hero, while Annabella is a little more morally questionable. I really liked the way that this production made Giovanni take on his fair share of the blame. Watching this production, it is clear that there is no excuse for what Giovanni does to Annabella, no Romeo-and-Juliet-ish overtones to their deaths. Giovanni’s obsession becomes almost stalker-like, Annabella the one clinging to something more like normalcy, the possibility of a happy life with Soranzo. This play omits the final line of the play, Ford’s final judgment of Annabella – “‘tis pity she’s a whore”. I found that, despite the problems I had with the chemistry between this actors, this production offered a more nuanced take on the characters of Giovanni and Annabella than I have encountered before. It is easy to portray Giovanni and Annabella simply as starstruck lovers, to make the audience feel queasy when they remember that they are related. This play complicated that, and as such, I feel like it exposed much more of the darkness and hedonism that lies at the heart of this play.

The most interesting character in the play is not Giovanni or Annabella, but rather Vasquez, who has an Iago-like thirst for inflicting pain and is completely amoral. Driven by his ferocious loyalty to Soranzo, he inflicts some of the most horrid tortures ever seen on the Renaissance stage, duly played to their hyper-gory extremes in this play. (The scene where Putana’s tongue is bitten out? Oh my God.) Laurence Spellman plays Vasquez as a likeable Cockney fella who would not be out of place in the works of Charles Dickens, and it is completely chilling. Beneath his friendly, immovable smile is a terrifying masochism. Spellman’s Vasquez drives the plot and drives the play. He is like a microcosm of ‘Tis Pity – everything appears fine, normal, friendly even, but underneath is a seething, mad, black, writing morass.

I found some of the dance sequences a little unnecessary, but the physical theatre in this production is excellent. I liked the way Donnellan directed it as an ensemble piece – most of the cast were onstage most of the time, and it gave the play a sort of claustrophobia while emphasising a message that is at its heart: individual actions can have far-reaching social consequences. Giovanni and Annabella’s love is not just transgressive because what they do to each other is taboo, but because they cross a boundary that causes their whole society to fracture.

The first play I ever reviewed on this blog was a production of the same play at Malthouse in Melbourne. It feels fitting, nearly a year later, to be reviewing the same play again. The Malthouse production was flawed, but good. This production was also flawed, but excellent. (Hopefully, my reviews have sustained a similar improvement in quality!) It is dark and gory and hedonistic and chaotic and passionate and wildly, wildly entertaining. If you missed it, you missed out. Cheek by Jowl should be highly, highly commended.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

'Tis Pity She's A Whore has now closed. It played at the Merlyn Theatre at Malthouse in Melbourne from February 11 - March 5 2011. By John Ford, adapted and directed by Marion Potts.

If there is one thing in theatre I hate, it is the gratuitous use of the smoke machine. Particularly if it's for no discernible reason. I date this loathing back to a time in my teens, when I was in a particularly awful pantomime version of Jack and the Beanstalk. The entire second act was set on a cloud, and the set consisted solely of a LOT of smoke. It was pumped in so thick that the cast could barely see each other, so who knows what the audience thought? I'm surprised no one died of smoke inhalation.

So when I walked into the Merlyn Theatre at Malthouse for 'Tis Pity She's A Whore - slightly ironic, I think, that I lost my Malthouse virginity to this play - and the auditorium was all be-smoke-machined, it's unsurprising that my heart sank a little. It's a truth universally acknowledged (when the universe consists of me) that a play that overuses the smoke machine is usually trying to obscure something... namely, the fact that their show isn't very good.

Thankfully, 'Tis Pity turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. (And also thankfully, there was no smoke pumped during the show itself.)

'Tis Pity is a very bizarre play. There's no better way of putting it. I don't know if it's possible to portray incestuous lovers sympathetically and not be a little bizarre. As an audience member you certainly feel a little bizarre when you find yourself hoping against hope that Giovanni and Annabella can find a way to be together... and then you rememver that they're brother and sister and that that shit is MESSED UP, man. Marion Potts made the interesting choice of removing the character of Friar Bonaventura, who appears at the beginning of the play, trying to talk his pupil Giovanni out of... well, doing his sister, basically. Without the Friar, Giovanni's lines become a monologue, and the play loses any real anchor. The descent into chaos begins even faster and is even steeper.

It's an interesting spin on Giovanni's character - instead of being resolute at the beginning of the play, personifying the Jacobean notion of passion to the Friar's reason, we see Giovanni essentially trying to convince himself that what he's doing is all right. Marion Potts said in the promo for 'Tis Pity that this play was about moral relativism, about 'when is it okay to fuck your brother?' By removing the character of the Friar, Potts has removed any link to 'conventional' morality.

This is reinforced by the set. Anna Cordingley's much-touted tri-level set features the angelic (both in countenance and in voice) Julia County at the top in the 'heaven' level; Chris Ryan as the subplot-replacing gutter-mouthed B in the 'hell' level; and the main action of Ford's text itself in the ornate and yet somehow hollow middle level. Whether this level is meant to represent earth or purgatory or something else entirely very quickly becomes irrelevant. The Angel descends down the levels, B flits between them... the whole dollhouse-like set seems set up to demonstrate that conventional ideas of good and bad just can't be applied to this play. You should hate Giovanni and Annabella. But you don't.

As the siblings/lovers, Benedict Samuel and Elizabeth Nabben are very charismatic, have great chemistry, and definitely pull it off. Samuel is an excellent physical actor, even when he's not moving at all - there's a great moment towards the end of the play when he demands from John Adam's Soranzo to know where his sister is, and even though he is standing still, you can sense (even from the back row!) that he is a ticking time bomb, about to explode. His performance in the bloody final act is also excellent. I wish he'd been given more opportunity to demonstrate his physical capabilities - 'Tis Pity is not a play in which things should be done by halves. I wanted more blood, more sex, more violence. 'Tis Pity is a play that needs the sort of aesthetic that Alan Ball applies to True Blood, and I feel that this production lacked this a bit. It was a little tame, and 'Tis Pity is not a tame play. (Is it a coincidence that the Puritans shut down the theatres ten years after this play premiered? Not so much. 'Tis Pity is Renaissance theatre at its bloodiest and most indulgent.)

I saw this play on the final day of its run, and to some extent, the actors had settled a little too far into the roles - Samuel, for example, delivered a lot of his lines at an absolutely cracking pace, which was at times hard to keep up with. Elizabeth Nabben as Annabella, however, was extremely well paced throughout. Both she and Samuel were overall outstanding. I'm pretty sure they're both younger than me and that makes me jealous.

It took me a while to realise why I liked Nabben's duets with Julia County so much. They were definitely absolutely gorgeous sounding - Nabben can sing - but I remember wondering what the point of them was for a bit. No matter how pretty they sounded, there didn't seem to be much point in turning the soliloquies Ford gave Annabella into operatic arias...

...until we'd had a few of B's overtly misogynist monologues about bitches and sexting, highlighting just how far society hasn't come when it comes to perceptions of women in general and female sexuality in particular.

There is no hiding from the fact that 'Tis Pity She's A Whore is a misogynist play. Despite the fact that Giovanni is the one that initiates the sexual relationship with Annabella, despite the fact that Annabella is definitely the one that suffers more as a result, despite the fact that Giovanni kills Annabella and despite the fact that neither of them show any remorse, the play isn't called 'Tis Pity Giovanni and Annabella are Incestuous Demonspawn. No. Giovanni may make some questionable choices - doing his sister, knocking her up and killing her come to mind - but he gets the romantic hero's death, a bloody end not unreminiscent of Hieronymo. Annabella, on the other hand? Well, she would have been fine if she wasn't such a skanky whore. The final lines of the play are:

We shall have time
To talk at large of all; but never yet
Incest and murder have so strangely met.
Of one so young, so rich in nature's store,
Who could not say, 'tis pity she's a whore?

In Ford's script, these lines are delivered by the Cardinal, a character omitted from Potts' production. Instead, they are delivered by B, the one character in the play who speaks in a twenty first century voice throughout. This highlights sharply how little attitudes have changed from the fiercely misogynist time of Ford to now. The women in this play are either virgins or whores and we still talk about women that way.

Annabella's duets with the Angel (I haven't forgotten them!) thus become a very interesting commentary. We've been told to think of Annabella as a whore, a degenerate. The play reinforces this over and over again. She can never quite reach the third level of the Malthouse set, where the Angel lives, but she aspires to it anyway. The bad girl dreams of being an angel. This gives great depth to Annabella's character and throws in some ethical greyness from a twenty-first century perspective. Annabella is equated, however fleetingly, with the Angel. Does this mean, in Potts' words, it might sometimes be okay to fuck your brother?

The script is quite heavily cut, which I think was a good idea. The original subplot with Bergetto and Poggio is not great and using Chris Ryan's B as a replacement really brought home the connection between Ford's world and the world we live in now. However, it did mean that the storyline with Alison Whyte's Hippolita and Anthony Brandon Wong's Vasques felt a little irrelevant to the main plot for a while. It was hard to gauge the connection between the two plots at the outset, and if I - someone who has studied Ford's text at length and written essays on it - felt that way, I don't know how someone coming in cold would handle it. This is not to say that Whyte and Wong don't do a great job, because I was impressed by both - Wong especially.

It's fashionable to try and pare back Renaissance texts to the bones. The bones, in this case, is the story between Annabella and Giovanni. What becomes clear when paring back 'Tis Pity is that Annabella and Giovanni don't really have that many scenes together, which is a shame. I don't think that's a problem Potts could really fix, but if there was any way that there could have been more Annabella/Giovanni face time, that would have been awesome.

I thought the sound production for this show was great - the contrast between the dark, grunge-y beats produced by Jethro Woodward and the ethereal voice of Julia County was really excellent. Putting Woodward on the stage itself was a little distracting, though - particularly with the sex tape he had playing on a loop near him. This detracted rather than added to the action... despite everything I said before about the True Blood aesthetic being the way to go with 'Tis Pity.

Overall, I really enjoyed this production. The Renaissance was an incredibly rich time for theatre and much as I love him, it's great to see something that's not Shakespeare. With 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Malthouse have put together a very stylish, very well acted and extremely visually striking production that has kept me thinking for more than a few days now. And if you didn't see it, you missed out.