The one where I scream into a cushion

Another week of London culture - and a big announcement

Jodie Whittaker and Joel Fry in The Duchess (of Malfi) at Trafalgar Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

I have an announcement to make! For the last few months my pals Nick Clark and Nick Curtis and I have been working on our new independent theatre podcast, The London Theatre Review. This Sunday sees the first episode go live, wherever you get your podcasts.

We’ll be reviewing London theatre, talking about London theatre, and interviewing London theatre’s biggest names. Do have a listen over the next week and let me know what you think.

What I’ve seen

I always slightly dread Jacobean revenge tragedy (I mean, obviously), because ultimately it tends to boil down to a bunch of entitled men doing their absolute best to either seduce, coerce or pimp out women, and then murdering them for not being virgins, and murdering everyone else for daring to notice. 

The Duchess (of Malfi), as Zinnie Harris’s messy, contemporary dress version of John Webster’s sordid little story is styled, is no different, and absolutely as expected, made me want to scream into a cushion.

That’s not to say I didn’t quite like it, as Duchesses of Malfi go. Jodie Whittaker is a likeable lead (if possibly not quite haughty enough), a merry widow a little too obviously delighted to be out of mourning after the death of her boring husband for the liking of her two self-righteous brothers. 

It’s never made entirely clear why they’re so disturbed by her, except that people are talking about her with a nudge and a wink, and it’s definitely that which will damage the reputation of the family and not the fact that one brother, the Cardinal (played with a sinister air by Paul Ready) is power-mad and routinely seduces other people’s wives, and the Duchess’s twin, Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne) is not just incestuously obsessed with his sister but also several tongue sandwiches short of a picnic.

All of which, and the occasional musical interludes (Jodie Whittaker has a lovely voice, it turns out), makes it kind of a fun watch, but it doesn’t really work that well, in all honesty. Joel Fry as the Duchess’s steward and new secret husband Antonio doesn’t quite break out of the weediness of the role (why, you wonder, would she be so keen to marry this lettuce of a man, knowing full well that if her brothers find out, they’ll kill them both?).

Though Jude Owusu is superb as Bosola, the servant hired by her brothers to spy on and betray their blameless sister, neither he nor Whittaker is really on stage quite enough to hold the thing together.