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.