The Duchess of Malfi performed by the Shakespeare’s Globe (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) (review)

The Globe’s choice of play with which to open the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (known more prosaically during its development as the “Indoor Jacobean Theatre”) was designed cannily to showcase the possibilities opened up by the long-awaited space. With its calls for visual displays, carefully controlled lighting effects, music and echoes, elaborate processions and concealed figures, Webster’s none-more-Jacobean tragedy seemingly aimed to justify the time and expense put into recreating the kind of space for which the play was written.

This dimly lit Malficaptured ideally the play’s management of space and darkness. In evening scenes, with the chandeliers raised to the rafters, Bosola and Cariola created focal areas with handheld candelabras while other characters stumbled around in darkness. Control of light equated to control of one’s own setting, from the domestic bliss of Gemma Arterton’s Duchess and Alex Waldmann’s Antonio around a candlelit table to the courtiers’ frenetic attempts to shed light on Ferdinand’s lycanthropic ravings. Ferdinand was able to arrange for a complete blackout of the stage in order to give the Duchess a severed hand unseen by the audience or by her. The waxwork of Antonio and his children (an actual model rather than the actors) burst through the darkness from the discovery space, illuminated like a shrine by hundreds of candles. It was no coincidence that it was Sean Gilder’s Bosola who peered into the theater during the Duchess’s wooing of Antonio as he closed the shutters that allow a small amount of external light into the Wanamaker, and so trapped spectators and actors in his managed environment.

A candlelit theater makes it surprisingly difficult to see the detail of facial expressions, particularly for those seated in the galleries where the chandeliers are frequently between actors and audience. Yet the payoff of this here was the sumptuous visual spectacle. Both James Garnon’s Cardinal and Arterton’s Duchess depended on their stately self-presentation for their authority. This was clearest in the Cardinal’s formal preparations for war, in which the candles became part of a cathedral setting as processions of nobles passed slowly around the lowered chandeliers and approached an image of the Virgin. But the candlelight also brought an intimate intensity to more everyday moments, as when the Duchess positioned herself near candles that caught the gleam of her dress and foregrounded her presence. Most effectively, as Antonio and Cariola exited and Ferdinand appeared to confront her, she remained seated, upright and dignified, at her table, lit by a sole candelabrum. On seeing Ferdinand in her mirror she paused only a moment before accepting her situation and continuing to speak in the same measured tone in which she had just been musing.

At times, this production felt like a technical rehearsal for the space rather than a fresh reading of the play. The total blackout for the delivery of the severed hand, in particular, seemed to prioritize showing what the space could achieve rather than considering how the effect of a severed hand might be negated if the audience could not see it. The overly presentational style of acting in some cases—notably those of Arterton and Waldmann—clashed with psychological complexity, particularly in the “apricocks” scene where the Duchess’s departure and Antonio’s reporting of her condition were played so abruptly that the effect was of narrative presentation rather than emotional naturalism. The problem here seemed to be that the attention lavished on the visual aspects of the production had come at the expense of a sensitive exploration of the acoustics of the...