Gore (not Al) without the dilemmas
REVIEW BY MARK STOYICH
The White Devil
By John Webster
Sydney Theatre Company, at the Theatre Royal
In Jacobean England, it was generally agreed that the end of the world would occur in the year 2000. How wrong they were! Our happy year has brought us not Armageddon (George W won't be president till 2001), but a spontaneous celebration of friendship between nations.
The Olympics has also brought Sydney a respectably sized arts festival, which includes an extraordinary number of Jacobean revenge tragedies. The Bell Company's Troilus and Cressida starts soon, the movie version of Titus Andronicus (in which the heads of children are baked in pies and served to their parents) is coming, and at the carpark-like Royal there is The White Devil.
Brachiano, duke of Padua (Hugo Weaving) lusts for Vittoria (Angie Milliken), so his secretary, Vittoria's brother Flamineo (Jeremy Sims, hamming it up), kills first her husband (strangles him in the gym — is that the Olympic connection?) and then the duke's wife (smears poison on the lips of her husband's portrait, which she kisses each night before bed).
The murdered woman's brother, Francisco, the duke of Florence (Philip Quast), hates Brachiano and Vittoria, and will have revenge. He is the "nephew" of a cardinal who later becomes Pope Paul IV; the two men put Vittoria on trial for adultery and sentence her to the House of Penitent Whores.
Flamineo and Brachiano bust her out, and run off to rule Padua. Pope Paul excommunicates them. Francisco turns up at the court of Padua, disguised as a Moor. He smears poison on the inside of Brachiano's fencing mask, which eats his face away.
Vittoria's lady-in-waiting falls for Francisco and tells him Flamineo killed his sister. Flamineo kills his own brother, for no particular reason, so his mother almost kills Flamineo, but changes her mind.
Flamineo and his henchmen, disguised as monks, pretend to give Brachiano final unction, but stab him. Flamineo sees his ghost; panicking, he goes to his sister with pistols and demands she join him in a suicide pact. She agrees to shoot herself, but shoots him instead, but Flamineo, not trusting her, has loaded the guns with blanks. However, they are killed by Francisco and his henchmen, who are in turn killed on the orders of Brachiano's little boy, who is now the duke of Padua, and who ends the play by having all the miscreants taken out and tortured, although in fact there appears to be no-one left alive by this point.
This isn't Hamlet, or rather it is Hamlet but without the meditations on life and death. It is, however, quite a bit like one of the dumber Hollywood movies, and an enjoyable romp.
The production is pretty dull, with all the money going presumably to the costumes, which look like they came from a production of La Traviata, and allow everyone to flounce about in capes and big frocks (and leather tights for Hugo Weaving).
One of the sturdiest cliches in theatre today is "This play is still so relevant to our society!" This line is used whenever the producers fear that whatever old classic they're about to trot out again is going to fail to attract the younger audience, and that includes this one.
"The time of James I was a particularly uneasy one, full of violence, etc, just like our own ..." and like all other times. Indeed, our between-millenniums era is characterised by a sort of anaesthetised blandness, and is exceptionally un-violent (in the West) compared to almost any that preceded it, even the Victorian era.
The charm of something like The White Devil, of course, is precisely that it is irrelevant. Our interest in physical violence attracts us to Jacobean tragedy, because its violence is unreal. Our modern dilemmas don't exist in it.
The Olympics may be a feast of corruption and inanity, but no heads are served up during it. Though we can always hope!