THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, Cheek By Jowl, Arts Centre THE Duchess of Malfi is, of course, a melodrama - incest, infidelity, infanticide, culminating in a bloodbath. But this Cheek by Jowl version, directed by Declan Donnellan, is no cheap thrill a minute - the surprises are far more subtle. In it we reach beyond the gore to the effects of social and moral decline on the individual.
The play opens on a chessboard, the characters standing on the squares like pieces in a game. As the production unfolds we realise these characters, however evil, are being moved by forces beyond their control. There is a feeling of corporate guilt, rather than individual sin; something rotten in the state, rather than in the man; children whose games have got out of hand - no guiding parent to restrain them, no God, no common morality.
And if this seems uncomfortably modern, the often contemporary costume, the cigarettes and whisky glasses, underscore a sense of the present. But more than these outward trappings is the manner, the urban cool, the protective cynicism of city people, played in tense counterpoint to the frequent excesses of the plot.
The Duchess is often shock-proof, dumping a severed hand in a bin as if it were junk mail. When her cool breaks, it is brief and soon recovered, the more powerful for its fragile brevity.
Similarly when the Duke comes across his sister's corpse, he seems emotionally dead. He drags on a cigarette and calmly asks for her face to be covered because it is dazzling him. The effect is to dazzle us with the line far more thoroughly than if he had fallen to one knee and sobbed in melodramatic ecstasy.
Anastasia Hille was blistering both in her occasional outbursts and in the intensity of her restraint. Looking uncannily like her brother, Scott Handy, as the Duke, was deeply unsettling in the incestuous games he played. In Paul Brennan we saw the S.S. uniform beneath the cape and the schoolboy behind the man.
