Robert Tanitch reviews ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore at Sam Wanamaker Theatre, London
The Sam Wanamaker Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe’s sister theatre, and sharing the same site, is a replica of an indoor Jacobean playhouse.
The pleasure of Michael Longhurst’s production is the experience of seeing a Jacobean play being performed in it. The lighting is only by candlelight. There are six chandeliers and the actors also carry their own bracket of candles.
The intimacy of the theatre plus the candlelight is good for a thriller such as John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. Total darkness is good for murder, too.
Giovanni (Max Bennett) and Annabella (Fiona Button) are brother and sister. They are also lovers; and totally nude when in bed together. (One thing’s for certain and that is they would not have been nude at the play’s premiere in the 1620s. Female roles were still being played by boys.)
Giovanni, who knows from the very beginning that he is damned and doesn’t care, argues eloquently in favour of incest. He and Annabella have a happy relationship until she becomes pregnant and is forced to marry a man she doesn’t love.
The excesses of Jacobean drama are often hard for a modern audience to stomach. Incest is but a minor horror amongst all the other horrors on offer here: murder, poisoning, blinding, heart-failure, two more bloody deaths and a promise of a burning after we have gone home.
There is also a vivid description of Hell by a friar (Michael Gould).The play’s most sensational scene, however, is when Giovanni, covered in blood, runs through the theatre brandishing his sister’s heart on a dagger.
The character the audience likes most, and even more so since he is played by Globe favourite James Garnon, is Bergetto, a comic blockhead, who doesn’t deserve, poor chap, to be murdered.
You feel Ford killed off Bergetto in much the same way that Shakespeare killed off Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He had to get rid of him before he took over the whole play.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
