Word: duchess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MALFI DOESN't EXIST in this production of The Duchess of Malfi. The turgid program note warns that Webster's seventeenth-century tragedy is a "waking dream." An empty lavender platform represents the ducal palace of Malfi; in Laura Shiels and Cynthia Raymond's stylized production, this psychological drama could take place anywhere or anytime within one's imagination. Shiels and Raymond interpolate dance and mime into the story to indicate the tensions beneath the Renaissance rhetoric. A veil hangs at the back of the stage, behind which a "Duchess of Imagination" flirts while the real Duchess in front disclaims...
Within this rigid constraint, the actors deliver mannered performances that are in several cases impeccable. David Cort, as the evil brother who engineers the Duchess' downfall, is unremittingly sinister. A Cardinal with a Borgia-like disregard for the moral teachings of the Church, he covets the wealth of his sister, a young widow, and cold-bloodedly arranges her excommunication and then her death. The Cardinal seduces and discards young women, betrays his brother, an ally in the conspiracy against the duchess, and is finally himself assassinated. The audience applauds when the Cardinal dies: Cort's portrayal allows for no sympathy...
...loathsome villain. Half-naked, he revels in his own corruption and derides the courtiers who hide their inward decay with fine clothes and a gracious manner. He listens at keyholes, squirming on the floor as he does, and obtains the evidence of her clandestine marriage that dooms the hapless Duchess. Sands mimes better than anyone else in the cast. Referred to more than once as a serpent, he slithers across the stage. Sands' first entrance is a masterpiece of--literally--insinuation...
...cruelest, if most honest, of the three villains if Ferdinand, the Duchess' other brother. Shiels and Raymond have gambled heavily here, casting a woman, Kate Levin, as the lustful Ferdinand, but their bet pays off. Ferdinand is passionately in love with his own sister: Levin's casting makes incest all the more unsettling. Insanely jealous of his sister's husband, Ferdinand destroys his sister rather than see her happy with a man he thinks unworthy of her. Unlike Cort and Sands, Levin moves awkwardly--on purpose. Ferdinand struggles against an over-whelming passion, giving in to impulse and then regretting...
...Maugham received hundreds of visitors there during his life, mostly men, later using many of them as material for his books and plays. Here, Morgan's style becomes lighter and slightly disjointed as he skips from one anecdote to another. Visitors included Noel Coward, Jean Cocteau, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Gladys Stern, whom Morgan describes as "bursting fat." Morgan looks back to Maugham's youth, when he had to live in the unfashionable section of London and take the streetcar, instead of a taxi, to attend the smart dinner parties to which he was invited. In that...