The gorgeous confines of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse are the perfect setting for this sometimes sexy and always claustrophobic play. A Jacobean study of madness and obsession from Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, it seethes with menace.
There’s a queasy intensity in the central relationship between Hattie Morahan’s Beatrice-Joanna and her father’s creepy servant De Flores, compellingly played by Trystan Gravelle.
Morahan brings a mix of regal wilfulness and wayward vulnerability to her role as a morally flawed young woman who complains of being coerced into marriage. She talks about honour, but as she enlists De Flores to do her dirty work her true depravity comes to the surface.
The character attracts our revulsion, and Morahan captures her complexity. Meanwhile De Flores throbs with desire for Beatrice-Joanna, and Gravelle imposes himself — in a style that’s charismatic without being showy — on his every scene. He locates all the dark humour in his lines, and can talk about murder the way the rest of us might talk about doing the laundry. And when the stakes are raised, malignity oozes from him thrillingly.
There’s a farcical subplot set in a madhouse. Bright Sarah MacRae is the young woman who resists the overtures of two disguised suitors, and an inspired Pearce Quigley is scene-stealingly ghastly as the warder Lollio, De Flores’s comic counterpart. Director Dominic Dromgoole does a good job of suggesting the links between the wild passions of one set of characters and the genuine derangement that lurks elsewhere in society.
Claire van Kampen’s brooding music adds to our sense of being trapped inside a murky, volatile world with two main characters who are undeniably monstrous but both able to seduce us.
Until March 1 (020 7401 9919, shakespearesglobe.com)
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