Giovanni declares his love for his sister by outlining his heart

今まで読んだ中で、最もヴァイオレンスで最も美しい劇は？と聞かれたら、迷わずジョン・フォード(John Ford, 1586- 1639)の『あわれ彼女は娼婦』(‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 初演1633年)と答えるでしょう。

この作品は、チャールズ１世の時代の作品で、シェイクスピアの悲劇『ロミオとジュリエット』(Romeo and Juliet, 初演1595年？) の翻案と言われています――簡単に言えば『ロミオとジュリエット』の兄妹版。さて、この時期はイングランドでは観光客も少ないので、普段なかなか見られない劇が上演されます。この前の『負けるが勝ち』もそのひとつです。さてThe Guardianに『あわれ彼女は娼婦』の劇評がありました。赤字で示したもっともセンセーショナルな箇所をどう演出するかが、見ものです。観たかった！悔しい！！！(Othello)

"Try everything once except incest and folk-dancing," runs an old Scottish adage. In fact there is plenty of both in Declan Donnellan's revival of John Ford's 1633 tragedy, although, in keeping with the play's Italian setting, its dancing leans toward tarantellas. The result is propulsive and exciting but, if this is not yet among my favourite Cheek By Jowl productions, it is because the society surrounding the reckless young lovers is insufficiently defined.

The greatness of Ford's play lies in the fact that it neither exculpates nor condemns its amorous siblings: it simply presents their passion as something inescapably doomed in a hypocritically religious world. The naive innocence of the lovers is slightly undermined, however, by our first sight of Annabella jiving alone on top of a scarlet bed. Since this is immediately followed by the whole ensemble dancing to rap music, we seem to be in a pleasantly permissive society. And when we get to Ford's first scene, in which Annabella's brother rashly confesses his incestuous longings to a friar, the dialogue is so gabbled we lose the sense of a relationship fated from the start.

Once inside the core action, however, Donnellan's production comes up with some visually brilliant ideas. As Annabella's maid describes her charge's prospective suitors, they appear like preening male models through the upstage doors of Nick Ormerod's poster-filled set. Lydia Wilson's teeny-bopper Annabella also undergoes a visible maturation as she movingly turns into an expectant mum, wanly surveying knitted baby-clothes. And, best of all, Jack Gordon's Giovanni declares his love for his sister by outlining his heart with stencil marks before inviting her to kill him. That gesture is ominously echoed when, at the play's climax, he does the same to his sister's torso before fatally stabbing her.

The young lovers are played with the right feverish intensity. Lizzie Hopley also impresses as the maid who gigglingly yields up the secret of the paternity of Annabella's child while being seduced by a leather-clad stripper. But the stand-out performance comes from Laurence Spellman as the double-dealing servant of Annabella's husband whom he endows with the cockney menace of a young Michael Caine. Sensibly cut and played at a lickety-split two hours with no interval, the production has an undoubted dynamic. But I rarely felt, as I did in the 2005 Southwark Playhouse production by one of Donnellan's proteges, that I was watching a tragedy of lust and death in which a corrupt society was just as culpable as the outlawed lovers.