The Duchess of Malfi, Great Eastern Quay, Monday 19th July

It was dark, I was frightened, and somewhere quite close to me a large naked man was singing.

Never having been to a production by immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, and extraordinarily lucky to get my hands on a ticket for their operatic attempt at The Duchess of Malfi after huge demand crashed their collaborator, ENO's website, I approached the venue, an abandoned office block at the less salubrious end of the Docklands Light Railway with a fair degree of trepidation. Upon entering, one is provided with a mask and immediately plunged into darkness, instructed to wander at will. It's a dislocating experience, and necessary to screw one's courage to the sticking point just to keep walking towards the distant light - the audience travel in packs for safety. It's a fair representation of the atmosphere of Webster's work, a threatening environment where much is obscured, and to be alone is to be in danger. We formed tenuous loyalties to wander (still mostly in darkness) through empty lycanthropy research labs, a church, bedrooms, a bar, a study, an echoing hall, a forest of tangled cable trees and flights of sheet music. My wanderings were scored by unnerving hints of the score by Torsten Rasch. This was a promising start, until I took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere, and emerged in the gents' toilet. I inspected the facilities carefully, but as they did not seem immediately relevant to the plot, I continued.

As part of Punchdrunk's decision to abandon notions of linearity (read: narrative coherence) there is no clear start or finish to the opera, and one simply walks around the various spaces in the hope of stumbling on a scene. Or follows an increasingly irate cellist, on the basis that maybe he know's where he's going because I sure as hell don't. The problem with this is that you can watch the same scene two or three times at half hour intervals, while developing a nagging feeling that you're missing something important elsewhere in the office block. Also, unless you are very familiar with the story (and considering the number of productions this year has seen, there's not much excuse if you're not) you'd be rather at sea. I watch the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then Cariola murdered, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Duchess forbidden to marry, then some sort of repentant moment involving Bosola, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Ferdinand fornicating with a male courtier dressed in the Duchess' clothes, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the madness of Ferdinand (brave nudity on the part of Andrew Watts), then the final denouement. I also spent about an hour lost. About two hours in, I was desperate to find the bar I'd seen earlier. I never did.

Ultimately, this is a flawed vision; Webster's tragedy are plot heavy, and by reducing the thing to roughly an hour of libretto, that can be repeated in fragments over the course of a gruelling number of hours (presumably even more gruelling for the actors, who manage very physical performances and opera singing), the audience have little chance of anything more than glimpses of motivation or character development. Punchdrunk and ENO end up performing a scattered masque of murderers, albeit one which honours the spirit of Webster's masterpiece. I have no idea how they managed it, but eventually we are all herded together into a cavernous hangar to witness the performance's death throes. Claudia Huckle (as the Duchess), who probably didn't get into opera with the intention of hanging mostly naked upside down over her audience does a fine job at it.

By this point I was tired, footsore, hungry, and still desperate for a drink. I had been by turns lost, frightened, lonely and confused. And this is why, despite every nasty thing I've said here, Punchdrunk are excellent. With the Duchess hanging dead above us, the curtain along one wall sweeps back to reveal three more shrouded, hanging bodies. But they don't stop. The curtains along each huge wall quiver for a moment, then continue, leaving us surrounded, hanging in a mist that seems to continue off into the distance, by dozens and dozens of dangling corpses. It is breathtaking, absolutely cathartic, and a horrifying revelation of Webster's vision. It's perfect.

Arden of Faversham, Rose Theatre, Thursday 1st July

Tucked away behind the great Globe, down a gloomy street, past the deliciously titled Bear Gardens, under a shiny blue plaque, is the Rose Theatre. It is a profoundly depressing sight. The paint is peeling, the box office is a shack, and the lady selling coffee from behind a wonky trestle table looks kind of grumpy. It is, as the nice young man kindly explains before we're allowed to take our seats, an archaeological site, although at the moment further excavation looks hugely unlikely. We get a quick explanation of the (only partially successful) campaign in 1989 to save the site, and are ushered in. Rope lights show the outer and inner walls of the original building, and the placement of the stage, all under a protective layer of sand, concrete and water, and it's a little bit magical to watch your reflection washing over the floor of the theatre.
The Rose has a reputation for putting on plays that are not performed often - staples of the Bankside theatre that might have packed them in in 1589, but just aren't doing it any more. In the past, I've missed Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Kyd's Soliman and Perseda here, so I was glad to make it to Arden of Faversham, as it's unlikely I'll see another performance for years, if at all. It's an anonymous play, but suggestions for authorship have been made in favour of Marlowe (there's the geography), Shakespeare (there's the Arden connection) and Kyd (there's a bloody massacre in it). I'm not really swayed by any of the arguments, but I don't think it matters, because as it turns out, it's a bloody good play.
The tiny stage, in the gallery overlooking the excavations, with a full house of cramped audience huddled around it, does not seem immediately promising. However, Peter Darney, directing, has not for one moment allowed his actors to be limited by the space. There are punch-ups, sword fights and a goodly amount of (graphically) physical comedy. Rachel Dale, as the conniving wife of the unfortunate Mr Arden of Faversham, 'ungentle Alice', is marvellous - seductive, cunning and charming by turns, as untrusting as she is untrustworthy, a good match for Jonathan Woolf's edgy Mosby, clearly out for anything and everything he can get. Mark Carlisle is a very sympathetic Arden, and Francis Adams does solid work as his rather less credulous friend. The cast as a whole do a good job of evoking the freedom of the city as compared to the closeness of the country (and its gossiping), and the London we see briefly is one where everyone is anonymous and the usual rules do not apply - a ruffian can have his head broken by a woman without retribution. The play, for all its tragedy, has a thread of rollicking comedy, and it's the dirty jokes that get the biggest laughs. The two star turns, who earn most applause are Kent ruffians Black Will and Shakebag, a marvellous punk pair, who here swagger around, insulting the audience, pilfering from them, hiding amongst them, starting fights, cracking dirty jokes and generally being revolting.
The script has been trimmed lightly, but nothing is wanting, and at an hour and fifty minutes, no interval, it's a neat little piece, quite fast paced and (thanks largely to Will and Shakebag) marvellous good fun. There is a slight problem in that doubling of parts has given rise to an extraordinary number of regional accents - it's not necessary to define characters thus, and left me with the impression that Early Modern Kent was a remarkably cosmopolitan place. But overall, a very fair showing, and a nice little domestic tragedy. Now go and write the Rose a cheque, eh?

Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford, Wilton's Music Hall, Sunday 6th May

Wilton's Music Hall, a short stroll from Tower Hill, is my favourite venue in London. Sadly decaying, it is the last remaining music hall, a miraculous survivor of the Blitz, and a marvellous place to put on a show. I've seen an all male Pirates of Penzance there, and had a goodly drink in the bar. It's got a damp concrete smell of decadence about it, and I love it.
Simon Callow must love it too, otherwise he wouldn't have chosen it to put on a secret preview of his new show Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. It'll be on tour round the country during the summer, finishing at the Edinburgh Festival, and hopefully finding a London home after that (fingers crossed).
Things were a little bit rough round the edges, as you'd expect - no set, no props, just the disarmingly lovely Callow giving an intimate explanation of what makes Shakespeare so damn good. Jonathan Bate has done good work with the script - Jacques' seven ages of man speech from As You Like It is used as a route through Shakespeare's life, and Callow plays a multitude of characters along the way, slipping gracefully in and out of a handful of the Bard's (and his contemporaries') plays. It's a charming little biography, casual and engaging, and runs the gamut of human emotion in Callow's performances - he's as fine a Juliet as a Launce. There are moments of surprisingly modern relevance, particularly in a momentary delving into Sir Thomas More, which touches on the problems of immigration.
My only problem is that it's such a tease. If you weren't familiar with Shakespeare's biography (what there is of it), or needed to change the mind of someone unconvinced by all the versifying, it'd be a marvellous start. But a few moments of Callow as Lear, or Leontes, or (for a few, fabulous, spine-tingling moments) Faust, just isn't enough for me. More Simon Callow, please. In Faust flavour, if you have him.

Women Beware Women, National Theatre, 17th May

At the centre of Gary Taylor's lecture on this play, previously reviewed here, was the hope that Middleton's work was finally getting the recognition it deserves. Certainly, on the great stage of the National's Olivier theatre, under a glittering chandelier, it looks like a hope that it justified. The best thing about the National is the pool of talent that it can draw on, and the cast for Women Beware Women is as sumptuous as the set.
Harriet Walter as Livia is marvellous - stylish, scheming, and relentlessly practical about the ways women can wield power. She is very funny when yearning for her young lover (a rather tentative performance from Samuel Barnett), and charmingly cynical in the chess scene that T.S. Eliot was such a fan of. Raymond Coulthard, as Hippolito, is a surprise - I'd only encountered him previously in the execrable Hotel Babylon, and he turns in a strong, sympathetic performance in which his love for niece Isabella is very believable. Vanessa Kirby (said niece) will need more experience before she can truly shine; she struggles to project to the vast space, and her voice often sounds strangled.
The design is a little tired - more Fellini - but during the murderous final masque hints of Early Modern style manifest in masks and some smartly tailored jackets, which is a nice touch to a scene that makes brilliant use of the Olivier's revolve. The montage effect is filmic and very slick, a nice handling of a scene that racks up corpses fast enough to be funny if done wrong. Where this performance really wins is in walking an impeccable line through Middleton's extremes - the tragedy is at times painful to watch, but the (often filthy) one-liners get more laughs than I've heard Shakespeare's comedies get at the National. At times it's a little stylised, where plainness would suit best, but there's really barely a foot put wrong.
As the man says, it's 'as if the plague of sin had been agreed to meet here together'. Sin looks pretty sexy from where I'm sitting.

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.

The Tudor Tarantino, BBC iPlayer

Dominic Awkwright charts the rise and fall of Thomas Middleton, with help from Gary Taylor and opinions from Professor Jonathan Bate, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, and actress Harriet Walter. Available here on BBC iPlayer until 12.02 pm on Tuesday the 18th of May. Well worth a listen.

Middleton: Renaissance Man, Gary Taylor, National Theatre, Monday 10th May

Gary Taylor is a bit of a rock star to me. He's largely responsible for the revival of Middleton's reputation, and shared responsibility with John Lavagnino for producing The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, as fine a piece of scholarship as you are ever likely to stub your toe on. But, see, Middleton's cool. He's the Rolling Stones to Shakespeare's Beatles. So when Gary Taylor rocks up on stage, with his long hair and his black painted fingernails (on later inspection, actually a rather fetching metallic blue), it's looking like a good evening to me. Under the glittering chandeliers of the Felliniesque set for Women Beware Women, his lecture-lite (geared towards the London theatre crowd, and pretty accessible) concentrated on how Middleton writes women. Taylor points out that while some of Middleton's work is undoubtedly misogynist, in Women Beware Women the ladies always have more lines than their lovers, something otherwise unknown in Early Modern drama. They're not always nice to other women. They can like sex with men a lot or reject it utterly, buy sex for money or refuse to sell it. They're rarely idealised - I'm not sure Middleton ever idealised a single character. What's interesting is that the first revival of Women Beware Women was at the Arts Theatre, a private members club that could get round the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's office. Thirty-nine year old widows who enjoy themselves with younger men of relatively lowly status apparently used to need a lot of censoring. Taylor is, as one would expect, a practiced and compelling speaker, particularly when in defence of Middleton's talents. And he's right. Middleton excelled in as many forms as Shakespeare - comedy and tragedy alike. The most popular play that ever played at what is now called 'Shakespeare's Globe' was actually one of Middleton's. I think they should rename it, personally...