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After watching Lydia Wilson’s extraordinarily haunting performance in The Duchess of Malfi, I might start a campaign for her to play every classical role in the canon in 2020. Give her Hedda Gabler, give her Hamlet; her stunning turn in Rebecca Frecknall’s affecting production shows she could breathe vivid life into all of them.
Renowned for its violence, John Webster’s Jacobean revenge tragedy explores the fate of a widowed duchess who dares to go against the wishes of her brothers by re-marrying. And to deepen the chagrin, her new husband is her steward Antonio (Khalid Abdalla) – and she even proposed herself. Step up, Bosola (Leo Bill), employed by the brothers to spy on her.
Like Wilson's duchess, Frecknall refuses to accept the fate decided for the play’s women by its men. Her version – if a tad too languid and stylised at times – is as dark as the black blood she uses, the violence deconstructed to the point of absurdity and the women haunting the stage long after the script writes them out.
Chloe Lamford’s glass box design begins as a place that the Duchess is looked at like an exhibit in a museum and later becomes a confining space of horror for the condemned. It’s in here, too, that Wilson and Antonio snog each other’s faces off while the men are plotting to destroy her – it's a fight for sexual autonomy.
As Bosola, Bill expertly shows why someone might agree to do bad things for bad people, and Abdalla’s Antonio is exceptionally tender as he watches a tragedy unfold before his eyes.
But this is Wilson’s night. Staring down her aggressors, she will only fall apart in private. As she resolutely follows her own path, you can see her calculating what’s going to come, but retaining a little bit of hope that it won’t.
It’s how a real human would behave in a tragedy, and it’s rare to see an actor capture that so intelligently.
Until January 25; almeida.co.uk
