
John
Ford’s 1633 shocker is a chemistry experiment—a dangerous cocktail. There are a
few neutral spirits—the father Florio and the uncle Donado are
well-meaning but completely blind to what’s happening around them. There
is the catalyst—the servant Vasques, who makes everything happen without having
any obvious personal motive.
And
then—most important of all—there are the volatile elements—the characters that
are high from the fumes of their passions. Hippolita, Grimaldi, and Soranzo are
drunk on the pleasure of feeling their personal mixtures of ambition, lust and
revenge. Annabella’s maidservant Putana is high on her sense of knowingness.
Our
protagonist Giovanni is the worst drunk of all. He’s a very familiar figure in
21st century America: the self-conscious rebel. Giovanni may be in genuinely
in love with his sister Annabella, but he often seems to be more in love with
being outrageous. He is addicted to transgression. In all of his conversations
and soliloquies he never stops admiring himself. He views life as if it were
theater. He sees himself as an actor. Even at the gore-filled end:
Shrink not,
courageous hand, stand up, my heart,And boldly act my last and greater
part!
Then when his antics cause his father to drop dead of a heart attack, Giovanni admires it
as a well-done theatrical stroke:
How well his death becomes him in his
griefs!Why, this was done with courage …
He
seduces his sister-who’s looking for thrills herself. Annabella goes on to have
regrets, but she exhibits the same addiction. It’s a play about thrill-seeking,
addiction, posing and going over the edge.
Cheek
By Jowl’s production at UCLA didn’t deliver everything in Ford’s play, but it
was an impressive spectacle. And brave, to the point of being foolhardy.
Brave,
because the staging dispensed with Ford’s sequence of carefully delineated
groupings and scenes. It rejected any hint of Jacobean courtliness. Instead,
the story was re-imagined as one continuous action unfolding in one
set—Annabella’s bedroom.
Before
the action starts we see Annabella on her bed, working on her laptop, listening
to music on earphones, texting on her phone. Castmembers are present
more often than not, hanging around, overhearing the most intimate
conversations, miming and dancing around in the background when not speaking.
This was not a representation of any young woman's bedroom, but rather a representation of a fantasy of a young woman's bedroom. The story was being presented as something we, in the
audience, project onto young women like Annabella. Annabella, and the disasters
that befall her, are something the public creates, and, frankly, desires.
It
was a wild ride.
Laurence
Spellman was appropriately disturbing as Vasques, emitting an ambiguous
combination of servility and malice precipitates most of the bad things that
happen. He made a chilling exit with “Pray, sir, go in: the next news I tell
you shall be wonders.”
The
text’s Act 2, Scene 2, was a particular triumph. Soranzo enters mouthing absurd love verses by
Jacobus Sannazarius, until cut of by the entrance of his outraged discarded
love Hippolita. Ford’s word’s aren’t quite
enough here. The tableau with Annabella as a statue of the Virgin Mary provided
the exactly right combination of hysteria, blasphemy and bad taste. And it
provided Hippolita with a nice target to blow up, and Hedydd Dylan almost stole
the show in a role that's often seen as irrelevant. Then later she singlehandedly made
the tricky wedding scene into a triumph—beginning as a vocalist warbling a
cheesy tune and ending in a violent death, spitting poison-spiked curses on
everyone.
I started to feel that they had expended so much ingenuity on
vivifying minor scenes, that they had no time left to make anything of the
major ones.
Above all, an hour into it I started wishing that they had
investigated Ford’s unique gift for quietly understated ominousness. I started praying that the actors would sit down and stop yelling for a second. But whenever
solemnity threatened to take over, the actors would run laps around the stage.
Or, if they were men, they would take their shirts off and show off their
chests. We lost the pathos in the quietly reckless peevishness of Annabella’s
Pish, do not
beg for me; I prize my lifeAs nothing; if the man will needs be mad,Why,
let him take it. …
Or
consider their version of the scene when Vasques gets the truth out of Putana. In the text, he seduces
her with quiet sympathy—and as soon as he gets what he wants, rips her eyes
out. In this production, Vasques flirted, poured drinks down her throat,
felt her up, brought out a male stripper, gave her coke, and banged her. The
orgy was quite a spectacle. But when the gore started, there wasn’t the jolting
dissonance of Ford’s conception of the scene.
Orlando
James (Giovanni) seemed to be the only castmember aware he was speaking verse.
Granted, John Ford’s sober, drab blank verse is not Shakespeare—it’s not even
Marlowe or Webster—but he has a grave music that can be quietly hair-raising.
Gina Bramhill botched Annabella’s purely musical soliloquies—though she did
fine with the purely dramatic scenes.
I
suppose the cuts were necessary to keep the show under three hours. But it was
a shame to loose the jaw-dropping scene when a Cardinal tells the citizens that
a murderer will not be brought to justice because he says so. It’s so chilling
that even a numbskull like Florio realizes, “Justice is fledd to heaven, and
comes no neerer.”
Also
we lost the comedy of Annabella’s idiotic suitor Bergetto, and therefore his
grotesque on-stage assassination. These scenes clarified Ford’s careful
filling-in of the background around Annabella and Giovanni. They aren’t the
only guilty ones.
