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...

The Duchess of Malfi, New Players Theatre, Tuesday 4th May

The Duchess of Malfi's getting a good airing at the moment, in Greenwich, here under the arches of Charing Cross, and later in the year with a collaborative operatic treatment from English National Opera and scary interactive theatrical groundbreakers Punchdrunk. Greenwich stuck to a predictable, if effective, fascist-lite setting, and I have absolutely no idea what dark madness to expect from Punchdrunk. Vaulting Ambition, at the New Players, went with...the circus. It could have worked - perhaps some kind of totalitarian ringmaster regime? But it doesn't stick, and a Cardinal is still a Cardinal, even if he's Cardinaling in spangly pants. Only a few of the performers are circus trained; they are mesmerising enough to completely detract at times from the action of the play, and talented enough to make the main actors' attempts at circus stylings seem woefully inadequate. The only real gift of the design is to James Sobol Kelly as Bosola, whose pancake make-up creeps across his face, becoming more and more skull-like as he piles up the body-count. He's a grisly Buster Keaton, a haunted outsider in this production, and it's a testament to the greatness of the writing that this interpretation works as well as any of the other, more macho portrayals I've seen. Just when I thought I couldn't find clowns any more frightening...
The design's a pity - there are some excellent performances, and the production could have stood up perfectly well without the big-top malarkey. The whole Malfi family seem creepily intimate, making Ferdinand's advances to the Duchess easier to reconcile, and our Cardinal, Andrew Piper is quite clearly after Alan Rickman's job. Alinka Wright's a very foxy Julia, who provides an excellent counterpoint to Tilly Middleton's Duchess, whose wooing of Antonio is charmingly tentative, for all her insistence. There are some nice touches in terms of costume design - Alex Humes' werewolf turn is greatly helped by leather and fur, and the lighting is innovative.
With circus arts enjoying a renaissance of their own at the moment, it does them a disservice to crowbar them into renaissance drama. If you want circus, get yourself over to the Roundhouse. Better yet, get thyself to Circus Space and learn how to do it yourself.

Tudor Gallery, The Queen's House, Greenwich, Monday 3rd May

The Queen's House in Greenwich sits on the site of the much older Palace of Placentia, birthplace of Henry VIII, holiday home of Elizabeth I (good distance from the plague) and subsequently the residence (although sometimes briefly) of all the Stuart queens of England. The best way to get there is to get the boat downriver from the Tower, because the Royal Naval College, which stands between the Queen's House and the Thames, is most imposing when seen from the water.
Most of the collection housed here relates to England's maritime history, but there are two tiny rooms devoted to portraits of the Tudor monarchs. There's the ubiquitous Holbein Henry VIII, of course, in between Henry VII (who always looks like a criminal to me - I wouldn't buy a used car from someone with that face) and Mary I and Philip II of Spain, who win the prize for most awkward looking couple ever. There's a marvellously gloomy painting for Francis Drake, 'Sic Magna Parvis' hovering over his head, which I like very much.
It seems appropriate, given the forthcoming election, to dwell briefly on the anonymous painting that hangs here, of the Somerset House Conference of August 1604. The Treaty of London was signed at the conference, bringing an end to nineteen years of war with the Spanish, whose delegation sit on the left of this picture, their English opposite numbers on the right, around a lushly carpeted table. I have studied this picture at length, and I can say with some certainty that not a single one of the politicians depicted looks as if he would apologise for calling you a bigot. At least two of them look like they'd have you quietly done away with first, and call you a bigot later. Call me old fashioned, but I miss that.
The highlight, for me, is Elizabeth I, British School, c. 1590, well into her fifties, and looking half of that. Elizabeth was one of the first English monarchs to exert such rigid control over her own image, and it's hard not to think, while gazing on her pale, perfect face, that we've not changed much. If she could have PhotoShopped herself, she would have - image is everything. It's not quite the same, of course - morally less dubious, perhaps. I'm not suggesting that spotty Tudor boys were sneaking crude woodcut equivalents of Nuts up to the hayloft to have one off the wrist over Her Majesty, and growing up all warped thinking that all the Tudor girls look like that, but... Well, maybe I am.

The Duchess of Malfi, March 27th and Volpone, April 10th at Greenwich Theatre

It's good to see Greenwich Theatre making a return to in-house production, since their past few years have been marred by a string of travelling flops. Their collaboration with the Stage on Screen company looks like a fruitful one, and choosing to stage classic works is sensible.

The Duchess of Malfi is here set in the inter-war years, starting with the 1918 Armistice, thus explaining the death of the Duchess' husband and creating a little background tension in the lead-up to the outbreak of a further war which turns the Cardinal into a mini-Mussolini and explodes family tensions into murder and madness. It's a decent production - there are some unfortunate stumblings over lines, and the pace would have been helped by some judicious cutting, but it's all very forgivable. Bosola's the real star turn here, although his diction is initially alarmingly mannered, the effect wears off, and Tim Treloar's performance is impeccable. It's a difficult part, but he brings a gritty sort of determination to the role, which works well. Tim Steed as the incestuous Ferdinand also deserves a mention for his oily, uncomfortable solicitousness of the eponymous Duchess. I can't really get away without mentioning her - Aislin McGuckin has a good stab at it, and has an appropriate wiry determination. She could tone down the hammy choking in the death throes, though - there are few things more guaranteed to curl an audience's toes.

The same cast for Volpone, with Richard Bremmer and Mark Hadfield duetting marvellously as Volpone and Mosca, with strong support from those cast members who had already distinguished themselves in The Duchess of Malfi. This play contains one of my favourite lines in English drama, from Lady Would-Be; 'I pray you sir, let me borrow your dwarf'. There was a severe lack of dwarf, and he was much missed. Incidentally, if anyone can explain to me what exactly it is that Jonson has against the Dutch, I'd be very grateful.

Despite the fact that by the end of Webster's work the stage is littered with bodies, I can't help but think Jonson's the nastier work, and his view of humanity the bleaker. Webster's characters kill and kill and kill, in the pursuit of money or revenge. There's a bloody sort of simplicity to his world, an internal logic. In Volpone (as in The Alchemist) Jonson's stupid, greedy simpletons queue up madly to be gulled and gulled again by sharper wits. Webster may seek to expose the darkness of the human soul, but Jonson finds the human body and its human needs grubby enough.