This 1772 tragedy by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is exactly the kind of play you would hope to find at the National Theatre. Instead it gets a rare British revival in a fringe theatre on London’s Isle of Dogs. Even if a number of Mark Ewbank’s cast should realise they don’t have to shout in a small venue, you have to admire the enterprise of a company that has resurrected a seminal European text.
Lessing’s play is normally classified as an early example of middle-class tragedy. In a way the label is misleading, since much of the focus is on the lust of an Italian prince who has fallen in love with a bourgeois beauty, and on the machinations of his chamberlain who stages a bungled abduction. While the play is clearly an attack on unfettered princely power, it also presents an intriguingly ambivalent heroine: on one level Emilia is a shining symbol of virtue, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, yet one wonders why she meekly accepts the prince’s hospitality when she has been forcibly separated from her intended husband.
Grace Monroe hints that Emilia is both fascinated and repelled by the amorous prince, but the most impressive performance comes from Andrew Nance who turns his chamberlain into a lethally intense Machiavellian plotter. I am just puzzled as to why, apart from occasional revivals of Nathan the Wise, we see so little of Lessing who was an important playwright, dramaturge and critic who attacked French classicism and steered German drama in a Shakespearean direction.
- At The Space, London, until 14 May. Box office: 020 7515 5577
