Change is the only constant in the darkened world of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Their play of 1622 is about fluidity – the slippage between love and madness and honour and disgrace. And it’s also about social hypocrisy. Dividing its time between upstairs and downstairs, it reflects the corruption of the nobility in the fools and madmen imprisoned for ‘treatment’ below.
The story, stitched together from multiple sources, bears all the familiar hallmarks of Jacobean tragedy: the past (as a foreign place metaphorically and literally) used as a salacious mirror of the present, and characters led by their illicit desire into ill-fated pacts and bloody murder. But Middleton and Rowley’s tale of the lady Beatrice-Joanna’s conspiracy with her father’s disfigured servant Deflores – who she hates – to kill her fiancé, Alonzo, is meatier than most.
As Beatrice-Joanna, Hattie Morahan radiates a compelling mix of intelligence, frustrated constraint and haughty certainty – humanising her while never softening her. Her passions might be her undoing but they’re also her strength. She outwits most of the men of her social class with ease, but in failing to understand Deflores as anything more than an object of disgust, is caught by him. Appearance deceives in all things.
The social politics of attraction and repulsion are among the play’s most fascinating aspects, as Beatrice’s desire changes from one of prescribed aesthetics (all of her pretty, titled suitors) to a warped awe at lowly Deflores’ ruthlessness in sexually entrapping her and his cunning in preserving their secret. Liberation from social convention into further tyranny presents a bleak reflection of the world. With little more than a few boils on one side of his face, Trystan Gravelle’s monstrousness as Deflores really lies in his sociopathic matter-of-factness.
Middleton and Rowley have dipped their toe into what is basically class-based sexual fantasy, given it a satirical stir (a veiled sideways glance at the scandal and corruption of seventeenth-century British life) and produced something that, here, still feels murkily modern thanks to Morahan and Gravelle’s intelligent performances, under Dominic Dromgoole’s understated direction. He puts the breaks on the melodramatics, instilling a naturalism that roots the elaborate plotting in something warm-bloodedly human.
This is certainly true of Pearce Quigley’s Lollio, servant to Alibius, the blustering quack of a doctor responsible for overseeing the local madhouse. Quigley delivers his lines as though he’s making them up on the spot. He’s scene-stealing funny as he hits on Alibius’s young wife, Isabella, and contends exasperatedly with the inmates. There’s a Blackadder-ish quality to the comedy Dromgoole ekes out of such moments with a few recurring sight gags.
But this is also where the production comes close to unbalancing itself. In playing the madhouse scenes largely for laughs, Dromgoole ducks out of dealing with Middleton and Rowley’s tricky representation of its mentally ill inmates (thinly-veiled Bedlamites). This Lollio, with his incorrigibly good comic-timing, distracts us from their brutal treatment as well as the ethics of their use as entertainment. Tonally, it’s an uneasy fit alongside Alonzo’s drawn-out and grindingly convincing murder.
But Dromgoole makes great use of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s potential for ringside intimacy to heighten the sense of the clandestine world inhabited by these characters. Well-choreographed and atmospheric candle-lit sequences mirror the murkiness of identity and shadowy motives that drive the narrative, as characters plot their intrigues while skulking away in the mausoleum-like labyrinth of Beatrice’s home or the madhouse.
And, of course, the division between the two is almost non-existent: extremities of love and suspicion turn the home of the nobility into a madhouse of hearts and minds. The reveal that supposed simpleton Antonio (Brian Ferguson) and bonkers poet Franciscus (Adam Lawrence) are in fact noblemen in disguise is a satirical dig upwards. And we laugh at them as they might laugh in false security at the ‘fools’ around them.
In the end, it’s up to Alibius’s wife, Isabella, to bring home the point that appearance is a mask – beyond which few can (or choose) to see. Sarah MacRae brings a sorrowful dignity to her character’s confrontation with Antonio when, after she pretends to be mad as a test of his professed love, he fails to recognise her. In a changeable world, where surfaces are prized but true intentions are murky, affection is scarce.
