When Chekhov is performed by Russians or Ibsen by Norwegians, there is a fascination in the approach a native cast brings. A Europe-touring collaboration between the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and the English classic-disrupting company Cheek By Jowl is a more curious kind of homecoming. Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play The Revenger’s Tragedy, set in Italy, is performed in Italian with English surtitles combining some of Middleton’s morbid poetry with paraphrases. The result is locational but not textual authenticity.
The scholar MacDonald P Jackson engagingly suggested that, whereas Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead retells Hamlet from the perspective of minor courtiers, The Revenger’s Tragedy most resembles Shakespeare’s play as related by the skull of the Elsinore jester, Yorick.
The Danish prince’s agonising over the ethics of revenge is comically exaggerated in the nine years it takes Middleton’s Vindice, whose fiancee was killed by a Duke, to settle scores through a darkly comic bloodbath. First seen clutching his lover’s skull, the avenger drives a plot featuring two gruesome scenes of corpses dressed up to trick someone into love.
Middleton’s depiction of a state and church riddled with corruption and hypocrisy feels clearly nudged in this modern-dress production to allude to Berlusconi-era Italian politics and the Vatican’s paedophilia scandals, with broader aim at lying, greedy leaders elsewhere.
Director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod conjure many more of Cheek By Jowl’s signature gallery-quality stage pictures, with 14 Italian actors luxuriating in physical business with bedclothes, cake, smoke machines, bendy limbs and the omnipresent skull. Massimiliano Speziani stands out as a Duke whose vicious pursuit of high status seems rooted in his low stature, and Marta Malvestiti finds agency and braininess in Castiza, a part that risks being a generic Jacobean virgin pawn.
Manically danced masques extend beyond an unbroken two hours a show that would benefit from a cut or interval. Ultimately, it feels rather as seeing Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen performed in Danish might be, with pleasures of geographical specificity balanced against losses of the original linguistic zing.
The Revenger’s Tragedy is at the Barbican, London, until 7 March.
