There is certainly some high drama (to put it mildly) in John Webster's notorious script of The Duchess of Malfi, as well as startlingly vicious language and horrific revelations among all the admittedly impressive poetry. But this quintessentially bloody, perverse, horror story is also so outrageously melodramatic that one has to be in the mood for what can come perilously close to silliness. Ugly silliness, but it verges on the laughable nonetheless. Or perhaps it just evokes nervous laughter.
All the characters are corrupt, the Duchess almost saintly by comparison. And one can certainly evoke contemporary referential criticism with this picture of a society virtually unacquainted with decent or kindly motives. But The Duchess of Malfi is, in any case, a difficult work to control and make lucid, much less palatable. Director Peter Hinton tends to be over the top and longwinded both as director and playwright in the tedious, incoherent works I've seen of his (though they are much admired and awarded in Canada, I should note). So handing Hinton the reins of this wild, dark extravaganza of labyrinthine evil strikes me as equivalent to hiring Evel Knievel to control a potential disaster as head of security.
The result is a literally dark production (hard to see faces much of the time) that makes a complicated play almost entirely incomprehensible. It does have stage violence that Webster might have loved: it takes fully two long minutes or more to strangle the Duchess to death, banging her head on the ground repeatedly (and then she will regain consciousness later, of course, to see her children murdered before she finally dies). We do see her lover hanging upside-down and mangled and bleeding in the background, with an accomplice (only to learn later that those were illusions, so we can enjoy seeing them murdered violently). And there are some naked women in the "asylum" scene and enough full-frontal male nudity to rival Naked Boys Singing.
Lucy Peacock is often compelling and manages some dignity as the Duchess. Paul Essiembre, as her insanely murderous brother Duke Ferdinand, makes that dangerously overripe role fairly believable. (The Duke pretends to be horrified at her secret marriage to a commoner but is actually maddened by his own incestuous lust for his sister.) And he looks good when running about in the altogether.
Scott Wentworth is truly commanding and sometimes terrifying as Bosola, the master of the Duchess's horses, who disapproves of the evil around him but carries out its most awful violence with considerable spirit. And the many gifted actors do what they can with Hinton's muddled production.
