Abstract
Seeing a play at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, with its interlaced panelling, pale-wood galleries and candlelit chandeliers, is like being invited into the miniaturised world of a vintage music box, especially when you are lucky to be seated near the stage, as I was. Certainly, a character like the Duke in Amy Hodge’s production of Women Beware Women, as he first appeared in full dress regalia, resembled one of those sashed and bemedalled officers one may see stiffly rotating in a music box to the tune of a Viennese waltz. Simultaneously, a performance in such a confined space of Thomas Middleton’s tragedy distilled a sense of claustrophobic danger. This was heightened by the fact that a politely suppressed sense of uncertainty floated over the audience, owing to growing concern over the COVID-19 pandemic. And, indeed, a few days later, the theatres closed.
In that context, it seemed to make sense that Leantio (Paul Adeyefa) should wish to keep his young wife Bianca, an attractive long-legged young woman (Thalissa Teixeira), safely ensconced in the home he shared with his mother. Bianca, like Jessica, had just eloped from Venice, hence the danger of risking recognition as she and Leantio entered through the audience. Seeing her outward-going manner and wide smile, one guessed that she would soon experience isolation as an imposition rather than embrace it freely. The cramped stage of the Wanamaker suggested that cohabitation with Leantio’s mother (Stephanie Jacob) might not prove all that easy, even though, comfortably plump and maternal in her plain dress and apron, she was obviously the kind of Mum who would be doing plenty of baking during lockdown. What Leantio had overlooked was that Mother was credulous, easily flattered and, perhaps, duplicitous. And he had forgotten to ban Bianca from watching the outside world go by from upper windows, unaware that such intermedial spaces can be a source of contamination.
Livia’s enthusing manner easily overcame Mother’s reservations and got her and Bianca out of their house into hers. A simple golden scaffold (design by Joanna Scotcher) framed the theatre gallery and unobtrusively drew attention to the upstairs ‘rooms and pictures’ (2.2) – unseen yet suggestive of the kind Sly is invited to view in The Taming of The Shrew – where Bianca, appearing at the gallery, found herself in the ‘prison’ of the Duke’s embrace (2.2). There was something incongruous in Mother sitting in her apron and placidly accepting to play a game of chess below. This, however, was soon forgotten when the stage became a board on which the actors, holding torches, became pieces in the game. The elegant choreography (Aline David), musical ambience (James Fortune), and atmospheric lighting, which came only from the torches, underscored the cruel manipulations with which Livia ensnared her brother’s niece, Isabella (Olivia Vinall), as well as Bianca. The two young women were pawns in a cruel game of chess – or moths in a spider’s web, woven by the sophisticated, ruthless, changeable, Livia (Tara Fitzgerald). Unaware at that stage that she would be limed in her own trap, the ‘experienced widow’ (1.2) played her hand all the more easily in that the ‘somewhat simple’ Ward (1.2), to whom Fabritio (Wil Johnson) intended to marry his daughter Isabella, was brilliantly performed as a seemingly witless bully by Helen Cripps, giving him a nastily undersexed appearance: he obviously could not compete with the mature predatoriness of Isabella’s uncle, Hippolito (Daon Broni). Throughout the chess game, Mother’s role was marvellously ambiguous. Her performance, gazing round with a fixed, wide-eyed smile, left deliberately unclear the extent to which she understood the double entendres that simultaneously commented on the chess game and what was going on above.
The audience was left in no doubt as to what had happened up there. Bianca appeared on the stage, immaculate, yet moving like a disarticulated doll. Silently she turned, swayed, wobbled, and finally fell to the ground, arms and legs at uncomfortable angles: clearly, something had died in her. The invisible violence of the damage was hard to bear. And it was that damage – that ‘wormwood water’ she had been forced to drink (2.2) – that cleaved her existence: her brief, previous one as Leantio’s newly wed bride, which seemed to hold out hopes, and her ensuing one, as an increasingly ambitious piece in the Duke’s game.
The chess game had prepared the audience for the elaborate complexity of the final masque (5.2), organised to celebrate the Duke and Bianca’s wedding. Hymen entered, with attendants, offering a ‘celestial cup’ to the bride, followed by nymphs (among whom Isabella) with ‘censors and tapers’, Cupids and shepherds (including Hippolito). Livia, impersonating Juno, the goddess of marriage, descended from the ceiling on a swing. Mayhem ensued, with toxic fumes, a fall through a trapdoor, deadly arrows, stabbings, and a poisoned cup of nectar. The game of chess had turned sour, its pieces all collapsing to the ground.
Middleton is right. Women, indeed, need to beware of such women as Livia. But the ‘deadly snares’ they set come from their role as procuresses in a men’s world which can deal ruthlessly with them too. It is Leantio’s perception of his wife as his exclusive property, his ‘master-piece’, a ‘jewel’ to be ‘cas’d up from all mens eyes’ (1.1), and Fabritio’s determination to dispose of his daughter, that place the two young women in the position of being sexually exploited and, ultimately, destroyed. We may currently be invited, euphemistically, to embrace lockdown. But the play, performed in modern dress reminiscent of the 1950s with an antique style for the masque, was a timeless reminder that in our world as in London’s imagining of early modern Florence, women are repeatedly forced into lockdown, in a variety of physical and psychological modes. And that the damage this causes can end up destroying the whole community.