Writer-director Zinnie Harris’s tepid modern-dress update of famous tragedy The Duchess of Malfi isn’t helped by the fact that it opened on the West End precisely one night after writer-director Robert Icke’s sublime modern-dress update of famous tragedy Oedipus. But even The Duchess (of Malfi) had avoided being programmed on the worst night in the entire theatre calendar it could possibly have been programmed, it would still not be very good.
This is a shame for star Jodie Whittaker, who was tremendous in her last stage role in another modern dress update of a famous tragedy, Antigone at the NT way back in 2012. Harris’s contemporary English rewrite of John Webster’s macabre 1613 play has some good lines, and she gets solid performances from Whittaker as the doomed Duchess, Paul Ready as her batshit brother The Cardinal, and Rory Fleck Byrne as her even more batshit other brother Ferdinand.
But the problem with Harris’s approach is demonstrated straight away with an opening scene in which Whitaker’s widowed Duchess cackles at her brothers’ creepy attempts to exhort her to remain chaste. She’s right to do so. But unlike the meticulous Icke, Harris has made no real effort to update her characters’ psychology for the present day. In Webster, the Duchess might laugh at her brothers, but it’s understood how dangerous they are. She is forced to conceal her relationship with her steward Antonio (here played by the entertainingly geeky Joel Fry) and the existence of their two children because she knows her brothers would kill them if all they found out. But Harris’s superficially modernising approach never squares the circle of why they would all act like this in what appears to be 2024 England - Whittaker’s Duchess initially mocks her brothers for their bizarre behaviour but then immediately goes into hiding from them. If she didn’t think they were dangerous, why? And if she did, why not just call the police or something?
The basic point is that despite the trappings of modernity, Harris’s take only really makes sense if you say it’s effectively still set amidst the deadly intrigues of sixteenth century Italy. Rather than boldly reimagining Webster, Harris has mostly just reskinned him.
I can see it’s a way of opening a centuries-old tragedy up to a new audience, but the fact of the matter is that The Duchess of Malfi is an incredibly weird play and making it superficially more normal and naturalistic just makes it seem even odder that these characters are all acting like this. The gory finale, which in the original has a sort of ‘yes Webster u sick freak!!’ quality, just seems extremely silly here.
And it’s not like this is compensated for by giving us loads of Whittaker. The role of the Duchess was always relatively small for a lead character and Harris hasn’t done a huge amount about that – Whittaker has a couple of big scenes but it’s hardly a showcase for her talents.
Harris’s production has a campy TV movie panache that makes it very watchable, but that’s a bare minimum. She is a distinguished playwright who has done some good stuff, but The Duchess (of Malfi) is a superficial take that leaves its talented cast at sea.