The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse may be indoors and much smaller than the al fresco main space at Shakespeare’s Globe, but performances in this reconstructed Jacobean venue tend towards the same style. Obviously, actors don’t need to shout to fill the space, but a certain exaggeration of manner is still required. Hattie Morahan is an actress of subtlety and nuance, but in her soliloquies and asides in The Changeling she “lighthouses” the audience and her voice approaches a singsong. And it works. (Her opposite number Trystan Gravelle’s strong Welsh accent gives him an unfair head start in the vocal music stakes.) Perhaps the air feels theatrically “thicker”, requiring more effort to get voices and gestures to swim through space half-lit only by period-faithful candles.
    
Another keynote of the Globe style is to go for the gag. It may at first seem perverse, but this is absolutely the right approach to take to Jacobean revenge tragedies, and director Dominic Dromgoole marshals his cast thataway with an almost filthy glee. Whether it springs from the unambiguous comedy of William Rowley’s subplot, concerning adulterous scheming in an asylum, or the midnight-black humour that keeps bursting out like Dayglo boils on Thomas Middleton’s main narrative of love, deception, blackmail and murder, laughter is integral to the genre. It does not trivialise the grisly events portrayed, but rather makes for a starker contrast. It is required in order to stop you choking on the decaying human meat and the stink of sex and death that pervades this world of excessive appetites.
    
The paradoxical elements come together in Pearce Quigley, the Globe’s finest clown. Bearded and lugubrious, he is nevertheless fully prepared to caper and banter in the most ridiculous ways, somehow conveying that he is quite aware how demeaning it all is. We may chuckle at his cavortings as Lollio, the under-warden in the asylum, but we know that the cudgel and whip he bears are always real threats. The Changeling is, for me, the finest example of this genre where laughter and screams come in the same breath, and Dromgoole’s first production in his farewell season at the Globe does it proper, enjoyable, unpleasant justice.

Written for the Financial Times.