How does one define Christopher Marlowe’s 1589 play? TS Eliot was surely right when he called it a farce filled with “savage comic humour”. But, although Justin Audibert’s production is refreshingly in period and striking to look at, it has yet to find the right Marlovian tone of mordant irony.
Audibert is clearly keen to motivate the descent of the hero, Barabas, into murderous villainy: in the early scenes, he is not just robbed of his wealth by the sadistic Maltese governor, but kicked and spat upon by the state’s bully boys. The only problem is that this is not The Merchant of Venice, in which the tragic hero is driven to an act of calculated revenge by constant persecution: Marlowe’s Barabas is fired more by a contempt for Christian hypocrisy and a lip-smacking relish for poisoning nuns or strangling friars.
Jasper Britton, a tall, imposing figure with flowing locks, certainly captures Barabas’s sense of intellectual superiority to his tormentors. Confronted by Christian rapacity, he mockingly asks: “Is theft the ground of your religion?” After his head has been dunked in water during a feigned baptismal conversion, his eyes positively glitter at the prospect of retribution. It’s a fine, robust performance, but even Britton needs to savour more fully the play’s note of malevolent jocularity.
I suspect this will come with time, and already there is good work from Steven Pacey as the virulently antisemitic Maltese governor, Catrin Stewart as Barabas’s forthright daughter, and Matthew Kelly and Geoffrey Freshwater as a pair of dodgy friars accurately described as “religious caterpillars”. Lily Arnold’s costumes are richly colourful, and there is an impressive score from Jonathan Girling that embraces everything from klezmer music to brassy Turkish folk tunes. It’s a good evening that will get even better when it taps into the laughter in Marlowe’s grotesque comedy.
• Until 8 September. Box office: 0844 800 1110. Venue: Swan, Stratford.
