After superb productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company of Don Carlos and The White Devil, Gale Edwards comes up with a somewhat tame version of Webster's grisly classic. A modern-dress affair, with echoes of La Dolce Vita and Pulp Fiction, it fails to create a coherent world that can contain Webster's dark nihilism, oppositional faith and astonishing aphoristic poetry.
Part of the problem lies in Peter J Davison's design, dominated by a towering, glass-walled rectangular cage. It's fine for spectacular inserts such as the masque of madmen or an abattoir-like exhibition of human carcasses. But it cramps the action and its inner depths remain hidden from the side-stalls. Sue Willmington's costumes also obscure the play's crucial differences of rank. It's the Duchess's passion for her steward that precipitates events but here the sharp-suited Antonio seems as fashion-conscious as his silk-gowned employer. Even the surly spy, Bosola, appears to buy his black-leather macs at the same emporium as the crazily incestuous Duke Ferdinand.
What the production lacks is a convincing ambience or any real contest between corruption and virtue. The programme intriguingly suggests that Webster's Duchess is a Protestant martyr assailed by a wicked papistry. But although Aisling O'Sullivan's tall, red-haired Duchess is tender, loving and visually striking in her seductive lingerie, she misses the character's defiance. She is not helped by the inexplicable decision to cut Bosola's magnificent bellman's dirge. I am not asking for old-fashioned, boom-and-bust rhetoric, but a line such as "I am Duchess of Malfi still" cries out for something more than plaintiveness. The Duchess is not just a harassed widow: she is someone who greets violent death with the do-your-worst assurance of a true believer.
Having discovered a note of feminist resistance in The White Devil, Edwards strangely misses it here; even the device, once used by Philip Prowse, of bringing the Duchess back to haunt the final scenes puts pathos before tragedy. In fact, the actors who come off best are Colin Tierney as a crisply demonic, wolfish Ferdinand, Ken Bones as a Cardinal who has no compunction about copulating with his mistress against a cross, and Tom Mannion, who stepped into Bosola's bloody shoes at short notice. Mannion not only uses his Scottish accent to suggest an aggrieved outsider at a corrupt court but even makes the character's fits of conscience convincing. On a grander level, however, the production misses the vital Websterian contradiction in which destructive evil is countered by resilient goodness.
Until November 18. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
