Tom Piper’s design sets the keynote for the play: striking, efficient and almost featureless. Upstage, a white wall rises, pierced on high by oblong windows opening on to darkness. Similarly, Zinnie Harris’s reworking of John Webster’s 1613(ish) revenge tragedy presents a hermetic world, shut off from external realities.
Where Webster’s action examines corruption and its contagious effects, Harris narrows the scope to a critique of misogynistic behaviour, without offering any insight into the social-political power structures that facilitate its crazy, destructive course. Two brothers are so terrified of their widowed sister – the Duchess of the title – being seen as “soiled goods” if she remarries that they will do any viciousness to save their reputations. Dressed in contemporary clothes, the brothers use video projections and electric devices to torture the Duchess. The relocation in time is also a dislocation: their maniacal insistence on this honour-based code finds little dramatic justification.
Where Webster allows his female characters agency, Harris (who also directs) focuses on their status as victims and concentrates on love and motherhood as motivating forces for their actions (her women even mop up their own blood after being subjected to protracted violence). The overall effect is of a Barbara Cartland story given a Quentin Tarantino makeover but without the pace or coherence of either. The Duchess is clearly conveyed by Kirsty Stuart, but, as in the original, the most striking character is the brooding malcontent Bosola (a brilliantly intense Adam Best).
• At the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 8 June. At Citizens theatre, Glasgow, 4-21 September
