London.

’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE
by John Ford.

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Shakespeare’s Globe New Globe Walk SE1 9DT To 7 December 2014.
Tue-Sun 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 3hr One interval.

TICKETS: 020 7401 9919.
www.shakespearesglobe.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 October.

’Tis good to have this fine new theatre so well used.
What did Elizabethan actors find when they moved indoors, from somewhere like Shakespeare’s Globe to the likes of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse? A short step for an actor, but a giant leap for the craft of acting.

The declamatory elements of performance in a large, open-air arena must have needed adapting for a smaller, enclosed space. Bravura could become exaggeration in an enclosed space. Lighting had to be artificial, covering audience and stage yet creating a separate stage-play world from the great globe itself.

Yet there were new possibilities, reflected in William Shakespeare’s later, indoor plays, for greater colour and tonal subtlety in speech and relations between characters, as well as allowing more complex stage machinery.

By the time John Ford came along (roughly as Shakespeare’s First Folio was posthumously published in 1623) indoors theatres were well-established. Michael Longhurst’s revival in the Sam Wanamaker’s reconstruction of an indoor Jacobean theatre shows that needn’t have precluded a rumbustious component, or the spilling-out of action among the audience from a sometimes crowded stage.

But there’s a new inward element, previously limited to soliloquies as open-air, larger-scale blood and thunder focuses more on character and psychology, less on rhetoric. After The Lover’s Melancholy (rarely seen) and The Broken Heart (due here next spring), ’Tis Pity saw Ford up the heat on his sexy titles, while creating a play susceptible to both larger stages (Jonathan Munby’s Courtyard revival in Leeds) and smaller (Ian Forrest’s in Keswick’s studio space).

There’s intimacy in Longhurst’s production, among the candle lights and resonant bare wooden surfaces, as well as wild laughter in the cut throats and gouged eyes, in a moral muddle where church authority is arbitrarily cruel and acquisitive, while murder may be omitted out of fierce personal loyalty.

The famous ‘bleeding heart’ conclusion announces its own emotional importance. More moving is the death of a character whose only crime is being simple-minded. In an otherwise fine production Longhurst gives way to the temptation to dowse the candles, allowing this assassination in the dark. ’Tis pity, since the pathos lies largely in seeing the victim’s innocent shock.

Giovanni: Max Bennett.
Soranzo: Stefano Braschi.
Annabella: Fiona Button.
Donado: Sam Cox.
Vasquez: Philip Cumbus.
Hippolita: Noma Dumezweni.
Bergetto/Cardinal: James Garnon.
Friar Bonaventura: Michael Gould.
Philotis: Alice Haig.
Poggio/Bandit: Dean Nolan.
Florio: Edward Peel.
Richardetto: Daniel Rubin.
Putana: Morag Siller.
Grimaldi/Bandit: Jethro Skinner.
Virgins: Isla Coulter, Hannah Hutch.

Director: Michael Longhurst.
Designer: Alex Lowde.
Composer: Simon Slater.
Choreographer: Imogen Knight.
Globe associate: Text: Giles Block.
Globe associate: Movement: Glynn MacDonald.
Voice, Dialect: Martin McKellan.
Fight director: Bret Yount.
Assistant director: John Haldear

2014-11-09 21:36:55