Forced to abandon her beloved Orgilus, and coerced by her brother, Ithocles, into marriage with the elderly, insanely jealous Bassanes, Penthea suffers from a broken heart. She is not the only one similarily afflicted in John Ford’s Caroline drama, in which Calantha, heir to the Spartan throne, is so caught up in Orgilus’s revenge that her heart cracks in two. But not before there has been much bloodletting, a murderous trick chair, death by starvation, a ghastly, macabre dance, a mock marriage to a corpse and wild laughter. Not for nothing was Ford a student of that most joyfully grisly exponent of Jacobean revenge tragedy, John Webster.
Ford, best known for ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, is having his moment in the sun – or at least in the candlelight at the dinky Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. While in Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company prepares to revive Ford’s even more obscure Love’s Sacrifice, here on the South Bank, Caroline Steinbeis is charged with breathing life into a play that lacks pulsating tragic momentum and lingered for centuries until Laurence Olivier included it in his inaugural Chichester festival theatre season in 1962.
The intimate, shimmering candlelit auditorium piles on the atmosphere. And while Steinbeis is almost certainly right to use comedy to relieve the relentless gloom of Ford’s long-winded drama, in which characters repent at not just their leisure but ours too, at times the mad laughter tips over into Carry On-style antics. It’s a bold stab, but left me unmoved by the characters’ fates, even those of the long-suffering women.
This is a play of extremes, but the comic overkill suggests that Steinbeis herself has doubts about a play in which one major character, Bassanes, suddenly undergoes a major personality transplant, and Orgilus so cloaks his intentions that he seems almost entirely bloodless – until he strikes the first blow and the body count starts to rise.
• Until 18 April. Box office: 020-7401 9919. Venue: Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London.
