A house style is beginning to emerge at this seductive chamber theatre. It is one in which Jacobean tragedy is played in strict period with subdued lighting, a satiric undercurrent and a strong female presence. After plays by Webster and Ford, we now get a fine-tuned revival by Dominic Dromgoole of this grisly 1622 masterpiece by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, that boasts a chillingly good performance from Hattie Morahan.
She plays the headstrong Beatrice-Joanna, who hires De Flores, a servant she ostensibly loathes, to bump off a potential husband so she can enjoy an affair with her adored Alsemero. But, as Morahan showed in A Doll’s House, she is expert at playing women on the edge of neurosis and from the start here she suggests there is something weirdly compulsive about her obsession with De Flores. Her eyes track him round the darkened rooms of her father’s castle and her fingers lingeringly trace the ridges of his facial scars.
Yet Morahan feigns astonishment when he demands her body as the price for the killing. Like all first-rate actors, she has the ability to think in the moment rather than simply deliver pre-ordained lines – so when she says “murder, I see, is followed by more sins”, it’s as if the implications of her action have only just dawned on her.
Although lacking the physical repulsiveness the text suggests, Trystan Gravelle is a cool, laid-back De Flores, who nails Beatrice-Joanna’s predicament when he tells her, “You are the deed’s creature.” It is also good to see that his murder of the unwanted husband is not some peremptory stabbing but a painfully drawn-out affair that reminds one of a similar moment in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain.
The play’s equation of love and madness is underscored in a comic subplot in which a jealous asylum-keeper vainly tries to incarcerate his young wife. These scenes come off excellently thanks to the undisguised sexual voracity of Sarah MacRae as the penned-up woman, a mirror-image of Beatrice-Joanna, and to the assured timing of Pearce Quigley as a wittily self-serving asylum attendant.
Once or twice the production goes for easy laughs, as when Beatrice-Joanna, having been mimetically ravaged by De Flores, announces, “This fellow has undone me endlessly.” As in The Duchess of Malfi, Dromgoole makes good use of this theatre’s capacity to achieve near-total darkness. Claire van Kampen’s music, meanwhile, has the right eeriness, and there is good work from Simon Harrison as the lovestruck Alsemero and Joe Jameson as the vengeful brother of the murdered suitor. This space’s suitability for downright comedy has only been tested once, but the Playhouse already seems a natural home for blood-soaked tragedy.
• Until 1 March. Box office: 020-7401 9919. Venue: Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London.
