A Jacobean doctor’s wife is accused of
adultery with a neighbour, and sues the slanderer in the ecclesiastical
court. They are innocent... strictly speaking; however, they feel love
for one another and had taken steps to consummate it (remember, back in
the 1970s, former president Jimmy Carter’s too-honest confession to
having committed adultery “in his heart”?). Without any explicit word
ever being said, husband, wife and “co-respondent” all know that they
must at best equivocate and possibly lie before God, and certainly
before the devious Vicar General.
Peter Whelan’s 1996 musings upon truth, religion, sex and gender (for
Susanna is an intelligent and independent woman who among other things
practises her husband’s herbal chemistry in his absence) are complex
and delicate – too delicate, I fear, to wield much dramatic power but
for one fact on which the fiction is founded: Susanna Hall’s maiden
name was Shakespeare, and she really did bring a suit of defamation in
1613. References to her father’s illness are laced through the
proceedings, and the evening ends with his offstage arrival in the Hall
household for treatment. It is as if truth is coming home, even while
Susanna states, “He was a liar too”: to the Puritan mentality
struggling to dominate the Church of England at the time, playwriting
is dissembling is lying.
James Dacre’s revival ends its two-month tour at co-producer the Rose
in Kingston. Interestingly, this playhouse modelled on the Elizabethan
configuration may expose the play’s and production’s weaknesses. I
suspect it might seem more effective on a conventional proscenium-arch
stage; on this broad, shallow thrust stage scarcely raised from
auditorium level (and with some groundlings sitting on the floor in
front of the formal seating), it feels more physically intimate but
this in turn reveals the failings in emotional connection. There are no
obvious shortcomings in performance, least of all from Emma Lowndes as
Susanna; it’s just that the requisite notes aren’t hit resoundingly
enough. The notable exception is the trial scene, with Michael Mears as
the Vicar General goading everyone else to a high nervous pitch. It
offers food for thought, certainly, but ironically it fails to seduce
one into the right frame of mind.
Written for the Financial
Times.