Written for Culture Wars
As problem plays go, The Changeling is right up there. Primarily because it’s two plots – the first of Beatrice-Joanna’s disastrous courtship with Alsemero, a vicious cycle of murder and infidelity; the second, of a paranoid husband’s jealousy in a local madhouse – run parallel without properly knitting together. It is widely held that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley wrote one each, semi-independently. On top of that, of course, you’ve got constant (crucial) asides, whereby subtext is writ uncomfortably large, and the small matter of an intervening dumbshow.
In this extraordinary production, director Joe Hill-Gibbins puts his head down, bares his horns and charges. “’Nuff talkin’,” you hear him cry, “Let’s do this. Leeeerrrroooooy Jeeennkins.” There is no trace of apology, nor any attempt to smooth the cracks. Scenes screech to abrupt halts. Music cuts out like a stalled engine. Lights snap to black, as if a fuse has blown. The play bunnyhops on.
By the time it comes to its clumsy conclusion – concurrent narratives wrapping up without intertwining – Hill-Gibbins has them drown each other out. His direction is of the Nike school and, by his just doing it, we don’t dwell on the inconvenient strewths. He that knows better how to tame a play, now let him speak.
There is, however, far more to Hill-Gibbins’ direction than brazenness alone. His aggression is countered with supreme control. At the production’s centre is a robust and straightforward performance of the play. His actors play the scenes simply and truthfully, taking care of the story. Hill-Gibbins then plays Buckaroo with it, hanging dramaturgical pointers off the core action, stopping just short of overloading it. A wedding cake remains onstage throughout. Cupboards, cages and boxes line Ultz’s unfussily bare stage. Food connects sex and violence, pointing (a touch heavy-handedly) to the animal urges that give rise to madness. Costumes are a collage: military uniforms, morning suits and high-street casuals.
The effect, like the different signature tunes that coarse through an opera, is to allow different perspectives on different elements. We can enjoy the narrative and decode it at the same time; the production is both plot and literary criticism. The play is exploded into its individual components, which are presented like a list of apparatus. If there’s a downside, it is that, occasionally, one sees right through the play to the other side.
When it holds together, however, this Changeling is brilliantly multi-faceted. Hill-Gibbins’s approach is that of a cocktail mixologist, finely balancing and counterbalancing individual scenes with dramaturgical seasoning. So, for example, when on her wedding night Beatrice-Joanna discovers Alsemero’s virginity-testing potion, Hill-Gibbins has the reception disco’s choons seeping through the walls, while at the banquet table the brother of her original fiancé Alonzo pieces together evidence of his murder.
The production’s other chief achievement is in making extreme actions seem utterly plausible, even sympathetic. Hill-Gibbins has a real eye for translating the text into startling images: Daniel Cerqueria’s De Flores, his pustulous face like a nest of maggots, becomes as accursed as he is abhorrent; as is his opposite number, Lollio (Alex Beckett) lusting in turn over his mistress; Henry Lloyd-Hughes’s Antonio, feigning the symptoms of cerebral palsy to get access to Isabella, is even more starkly repulsive. Yet, all are grounded in the strength of their motivating (animal) urges.
These, too, do for Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Alsemero, who bursts from straight-laced preppiness to raging cuckold like the incredible hulk and Jessica Raine’s Beatrice-Joanna, whose attempts to extricate herself from an undesirable situation only serve to tighten her tangle like a fly wrigging out of a spider’s web. That she seems collected and rational throughout, despite plotting murder, allowing herself to be deflowered by De Flores and bedswapping with her maid is an extraordinary feat in itself.
And all this without mention of the dumbshow. Infused with Gaga and Beyonce, it is warped and ironic, hysterical and hideous, and, for my money, provides ten of the most thrilling, squirm-inducing and brash minutes you’ll see in a theatre all year.
Photograph: Keith Pattison
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