Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Gore-filled Jacobean tragedy is a bloody mess
Gore fest: The Duchess of Malfi
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
The Duchess Of Malfi
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
MARIA ABERG’S 2014 production of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil demonstrated that she is at home with that writer’s blood-soaked, nightmare world. There is certainly no shortage of blood in her treatment of Webster’s great companion piece The Duchess of Malfi.
The final scenes involve the cast wading around and rolling in a lake of blood to such an extent that many in the audience must have worried about the RSC laundry bills.
Whereas her earlier production reminded us of an Italianate US gangster fiefdom, this slimmed-down version of Webster’s other major tragedy has no sense of any social context in which the inane cruelties take place.
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