The Duchess of Padua, Pentameters Theatre, 12th May

Oscar Wilde and revenge tragedy. Well, I could hardly turn it down.
Pentameters is a small studio theatre over the Horseshoe pub in leafy Hampstead - I'm fond of these arrangements, because pub theatres usually more than repay the effort of getting out of the West End (I'm looking at you, Rosemary Branch), but I arrived with a certain amount of trepidation, and a nervous respect for any company prepared to attempt this play, which seems to have made a positive effort to kill off its casts in the past.
The Duchess of Padua was written by Wilde in 1883, and has never been performed in England. Wilde imagined a lush set for his Renaissance stylings (he seems very keen on huge marble columns - make of that what you will), but things are rather more austere here, with the music providing what the set can't. There's not much to be done about the script, though. He gave it his all, I'm sure, but it is at best a pastiche. Aiming at the Italianate tragedies of Webster and Middleton, the lines lack the power of the first and the punch of the latter, and the most memorable lines are only so for their mawkishness. I could list them, but I don't want to.
The actors do a very fair job, however. Victoria Porter's Duchess has a tightly-wound desperation about her, and her Duke is marvellously nasty (however stuffed his mouth is with Oscar's pretty paradoxes). There are shades of Browning's My Last Duchess here - she is by no means his first wife, and he plays the unpleasant insinuations about what may have become of the previous with a marvellously light touch. Rupert Savage, as leading man Guido, though, is so extraordinarily wooden that I very much doubt he will ever be a real boy.
I don't believe that this play will ever be more than a Wildean curiosity. It's a failure as a revenge tragedy, occasionally and awkwardly farcical, its denouement is founded on faulty premises (having a ruler in the Borgia mould up in court facing a death sentence just seems silly) and it lacks a much needed epilogue to round it off. Overall, nice try, shame about the play.