‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore
Sydney Festival in association with Sydney Theatre presents ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE by Cheek by Jowl, from the play by John Ford at the Sydney Theatre.
‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE by John Ford is calculated to have been written somewhere between 1629-1633. It was published, definitely, we know, in 1633. It was written in the Kingship of Charles I, a period of English history, sat between the glories of Elizabeth I and the Revolution led by Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. The arrival on the English throne by the Scottish, Stuart heir, James I, (1603-25) marks a time of resplendent venal corruption., from the Elizabethan Age to the terrors of Commonwealth.
Following on, from what appeared to be the Golden Age of Elizabeth, James I, ”was weak, effete, vain, extravagant,corrupt with homosexual tendencies that led him into misjudged favouritism and made him many enemies. James ruled a court rotten with graft and corruption.” In this period (1603-25) the theatre artists responded with works which now have the collective appellation of The Jacobean Tragedies. They are often concerned with Bloody Revenge and Tragedy. They are mostly set in Italy, too dangerous to set in the English realm, and have the influence, firstly, of the Roman poet / philosopher , Seneca , usually swathed in bloody revenge and gore, and, secondarily, the machinations of Machiavelli, exposed in his book THE PRINCE, and through the accidents of dramatic history, having his name mistakenly synonymous with death and intrigue, particularly as the fame of the Borgias spread throughout Europe. HAMLET, THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY, THE CHANGLING, THE DUCHESS OF MALFI (to be seen as part of the Bell Shakespeare season, later this year) are part of that dramatic inheritance.
Charles I was no less a foolish King but his blunders were about war, religion and monies, not so much sex, but the political intrigues were just as intense. The power of money – the source of the agitations of the times. The playwrights of this later period, carried on the tradition of their recent forebears, for the audience still wandered from the fields of a public hanging, drawing and quartering or bear pit battle to the theatre and relished the sensation of horrible crime enacted for them with all the blood and steaming innards that the acting companies could muster.
I have always connected Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET (1594) as a duo, with the life of Ford’s ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE. Both set in Italy- one in Verona the other in Parma. Both with two sets of young lovers, with a religious adviser, the Friars’ Lawrence and Bonaventura, and a vulgarly secular advisor, the Nurse to Juliet and Putana, the tut’ress to Annabella. Both set in a world where the young woman is at the centre of marriage bargains with pressing suitors, both set in a world of ambition of upward mobility: materialistic, affluent, acquisitive, bourgeois and with moral values to match. In such a society only the shrewd and rich survive. Love and violence and that interaction – the theme, for both.
Romeo and Juliet, members of two different warring families, fatally fall in love. A cultural taboo. Tragedy does ensue. In ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE, Giovanni and Annabella fatally fall in love. They are brother and sister. A cultural taboo. Tragedy does ensue. A cultural taboo of Incest. INCEST. Incest was not an unfamiliar source of dramatic conflict in this period, but never had such a rendering of this taboo been so empathetic.The power of the actions on all societies , the present may be more violently revolted than other times, is such, that the persons who commit it are tainted and marked out for some terrible retribution.
What the Cheek by Jowl company under the direction of Declan Donnellan and design vision of Nick Omerod have done is make this story sit powerfully in the present world of moral instabilities and hypocrisies of government and church, of rampant materialism and a loss of guiding principles and values. The original is not set in the palaces of rulers but in the house of the mobile bourgeoise. This could be the Italy of Berlusconi and with the ‘dancing’ friar and Cardinal, of Benedict “Bunga”- parties and indulgences to the fore of life. But the specificity of Italy is not necessary to see the broader application to, particularly, Western World values. Even to our very own suburbs of ambitious wealth. To families of children with senses of entitlement and being “rulers of the world.” Where their pleasure is their will.
The original play has three plots spinning throughout the text, in this version, the comic plot (the supposed weakest one) concerning a suitor Bergetto and his servant Poggio, has been excised. We are concerned with the incest plot of the two siblings, Giovanni (Jack Gordon) and Annabella (Lydia Wilson) and the marriage ambitions of Soranzo (Jack Hawkins) with the help of his servant Vasques (Laurence Spellman), dully focused on the heiress Annabella, despite a spurned other woman, Hippolita (Suzanne Burden).
Set in a large room/suite of a large house. A tawdry armoire with carelessly open and clothes-draped doors, let us see a young girl’s excessive wardrobe of clothes. Along the extensive back wall there is an entrance door and another, to a functioning white tiled bathroom- shower stall and tub.On this wall are a collection of popular culture posters tacked/stuck conveniently to the wall. Annabella, i.e.” Anna the Beauty” has a series of icons to inspire her : Scarlett from GONE WITH THE WIND; Alexandro del Largo from SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH; Holly Goligtly from BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S; Sookie Stackhouse from TRUE BLOOD. There are other images from Manga cartoons. Role models for the young and the vapid, perhaps. No classical art here just disposable, cheap images of a pop culture. Even the Madonna with a bleeding heart, hanging in a corner, is a nasty copy. In the centre of the room, front, a free standing bed covered in less than fresh red laundry, harbours a casually dressed young woman,with a partially shaved hair style, grooving with head sets, to her private, silent disco. She moves to the beat of a different drummer. The visual impact of this space and the behaviour of Annabella suggests a young woman indulged, spoilt and bored.
Giovanni, her brother is no less a louche figure , though more aware, empowered, maybe drug deluded, with a sense of the right of his will as he shrugs off the moralising admonitions of his confessor, and pursues his lust for his sister. That she is similarly attracted, is of no surprise, considering the design clues set up in this production by Mr Donnellan, and is simply told by Ford :
“The love of thee, my sister, and the view
Of thy immortal beauty hath untuned
All harmony both of my rest and life.”
Annabella’s response is in the same simple key and their sense of undisturbed entitlement to their desires is captured in a delicate, unflowered ritual which follows :
ANNABELLA:
On my knees, She kneels
Brother, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate,
Love me, or kill me, brother.
GIOVANNI:
On my knees, He kneels.
Sister, even by my mother’s dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate,
Love me, or kill me, sister.
They thus seal their fate (killing is assured) and face the social obligation intrusions of the real world. Annabella is sought in marriage by many suitors but Soranzo is the selected one. That Soranzo is an exemplar of the contriving hedonistic, ambitious lout, considering his relationship with the widow Hippolita, who he has seduced with promises of marriage, and his part in the death of her husband, he, now, finding better and younger pickings, rejects her with hypocritical casuistry :
The vows I made, if you remember well,
Were wicked and unlawful: ’twere more sin
To keep them than to break them.
The facts about his past are well known, and yet this is the man who is generally accepted as the fittest claimant of Annabella’s hand by the family and society. Which world should be more condemned, that of the brother and sister or that of the suitor? “From one point of view the wooing of Soranzo and Annabella is the confrontation between an adulterous attempted murderer an incest participant; from another it is the meeting of an eligible nobleman and the daughter of a bourgeois gentleman.” We as an audience are placed in a foul dilemma. That we recognise it as the way of the world, then and now, is a gravely unsettling thing.
Culturally, the bloody doings of this play, even to the appearance of Giovanni “trimmed in reeking blood” with a bloody heart impaled on the end of a dagger, or in this production, the engorged penis of Soranzo as he leaves the bed of Annabella, or the naked sights of the shower cubicle, are not overly sensational, our present cultural arts: theatre, movie going and television having desensitized us to a degree of minimal shock. This, too, becomes a source of disturbance. As, surely, there is decadence here, of impressive proportions. The production sound design (by Composer and Sound Designer, Nick Powell) pumps out the thumping noise of popular culture with an emphatic beat so that the tribal hysteria, the chorus dancing, about bloody doings, become part of an hysterical ease of embracement , even mild excitement, one was careful to the curb one’s own stamp of foot. It blends us to blandishments of appreciation. Of acceptance of the moral compass of this giddy world. We applaud amazedly. Perhaps, blasé, dazzedly.
But for my $100 or more, including program ($10), I was not overly impressed.”Blood”, “Heart” and “Confusion” are the three iconic words of this text. No doubt there was blood, but really little heart in the playing. Confusion was the word that stuck me to summarise this performance of this edit of the John Ford play. It seemed to be a less than engaged and disciplined cast, at my performance, a bit of a walk through, with a wide range of varying quality of skills present, that did not seem to establish , why Cheek by Jowl is so esteemed. The OTHELLO that I saw, by this company, in this same theatre a few years ago, also lacked intellectual and playing cogency. A Festival production on holiday in the antipodes?!! The voices of the actors were worn and ragged, the use of the language seemed to me an imitation of contemporary sms text reading – it came either in bursts of tumbling words or at a word by word delivery. No music in these sounds and not always cogent good sense. It was sometimes useful, though mostly distracting, to be able to read the text jerked onto the side screens in the auditorium, just to check what they had actually said. The directorial decisions of the actors on stage as chorus observers, interesting, but unresolved in aesthetics or theatrical clarity.The design concept, messy and not necessarily useful.
I know lots of friends who enjoyed it. I did not.
I like the play. I liked the concept, but not much else. When paying, in these stringent times, $100, I can demand more than this.