Although only an actual time traveller would have realised the significance at the time, there’s something delightful about the fact that Jodie Whittaker’s last stage outing in London was in the National Theatre’s ‘Antigone’ – she was in the title role, and one Christopher Eccleston played her uncle Creon as a slick, Blair-like politician.
Fun as it would be to leave her stage career with this team up of the once and future Timelords, Whittaker is very much an ex-Doctor now, and it’s time for her to knuckle down to some stage work.
‘The Duchess’ is playwright-director Zinnie Harris’s 2018 adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean gorefest ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ – the same basic story about how the titular heroine is brought down by envious men, but pointedly modernised, with the Duchess’s character now a bit more than ‘virtuous’.
