Earlier this year, the London fringe saw a production of Lewis Theobald’s 1727 play
Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed to be a revision of
Cardenio,
an otherwise lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Gregory Doran
for the RSC has “re-imagined” the play, returning characters’ names and
relationships to their originals in the episode of
Don Quixote
from which the story is derived and adding scenes missing in Theobald’s
version. The bizarre thing about the result is that it somehow feels
less Shakespearean than that recent London revival.
Numerous
aspects of the plot recall elements of assorted Shakespeare dramas,
principally the climactic scene in which the villainous Fernando’s
duplicity – the double falsehood against both Dorotea whom he seduced
and then abandoned, and his friend Cardenio whose beloved Luscinda he
then targets – is revealed in a staged series of petitions before the
Duke, in the style of
Measure For Measure.
But to say that a dramatic touch is reminiscent of the Bard’s work is
not to say it is cut from the same fabric. Time and again I found
myself having to concentrate simply to listen to the unmemorable verse
or to care what happened to these two-dimensional characters.
Many
of the principals seem immature in a most un-Shakespearean way. Oliver
Rix’s Cardenio puts visible effort into pressing his suit with Luscinda
and her father, and is then childishly proud of the summons to the
ducal court with which Fernando gets him out of the way. Alex Hassell
makes this role the focus of the production, yet the only consistent
note is Fernando’s Blair-like conviction that everything he does is at
least necessary and usually noble; Hassell is, too, a more comically
than villainously gifted actor, which further detracts from the weight
of the evening. Pippa Nixon’s Dorotea weeps away the second half in
rural exile (disguised as a young shepherd, natch), then reclaims the
hand of her still-beloved Fernando at the end. This is not complexity,
it is convenience and muddle. The most human figure is Christopher
Godwin as Cardenio’s father, whose seriocomic bluntness suggests a
slightly better-disposed Lord Capulet. Spanish costuming and score add
an air of authenticity which is geographical rather than dramatic,
still less Shakespearean. In January I concluded that
Double Falsehood will not become a canonical work; nor will this version.
Written for the Financial
Times.