’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (review)

All sorts of horrible things invaded a teenage girl’s bedroom in Cheek by Jowl’s intense production of John Ford’s 1633 tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. While the play’s text toggles between indoor scenes of incest and street scenes that expose the corruption of the Italian setting, this slightly compressed production pushed everything inside Annabella’s bedroom. Sometimes it was uncomfortable to watch. We felt we shouldn’t be seeing these things.

Center stage was occupied by a bed with bright red sheets—the staging left little space for subtlety—and that bed served as the focus of all the play’s action, making an impromptu altar as well as serving more predictable functions. Two backstage doors framed the bedroom on either side, and through these openings an over-ripe, decadent society, featuring lusty widows and corrupt clergy, leered in on the girl’s room, as we the audience peered in from the other side. An evocative assortment of posters on the back wall made the room resemble a pre-digital Facebook page, charting the heroine’s emerging sense of self. True Blood. Kabaret. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Gone with the Wind. And, at stage right, apart from the other posters, an image of the Virgin Mary.

The trouble started fast, right after Annabella began playing sock puppets on the bed with her brother Giovanni. As the two consummated their mutual love under the red sheets, however, the world closed in on them, in the form of a group of men, including their father, who came on stage to negotiate Annabella’s marriage. Having the incestuous affair begin under the not-seeing eyes of the father and his associates may not have been subtle, but the red, moving, audible mass beneath the covers made a potent visible rejoinder to the older men’s attempts to control the young woman’s body. Eventually Soranzo, played winningly by Jack Hawkins, won her hand—but the muffled forms in front of him, finally still, showed what he had won.

What I often love about Cheek by Jowl productions is their breakneck pacing and headlong rush through their material. As with last year’s Macbeth (which I reviewed in Shakespeare Bulletin 29.4), they played ’Tis Pity straight through without an intermission. There was no place for the audience to hide, no civilizing cocktails to assert distance between us and them during the interval. The strong ensemble cast hammered the melodramatic metaphors home. Jack Gorden’s Giovanni drew a lipstick heart on his chest to show his love for his sister in the opening scene, and then cut out her living heart before the last scene. The chorus of adult men which matched Annabella with Soranzo also chanted the incestuous couple’s love-revealing words back to them, in a parody of religious rites, when they first kissed. When Annabella married Soranzo roughly midway through the play, lovelorn Giovanni turned up as wedding photographer taking close-up pictures of the bride. The lusty widow Hippolyta, played with gusto by Suzanne Burdon, reprised and mocked Annabella’s sexy dancing with ecstatic gyrations of her own.

Fig. 3.

Lydia Wilson as Annabella and Jack Gordon as Giovanni in Cheek by Jowls 2012 production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, directed by Jane Gibson. Photo courtesy of Richard Termine.

But the performance remained throughout in Annabella’s room, and Lydia Wilson’s performance was the star around which this world orbited. The doomed heroine embodied the greatest variety of dramatic positions: child...