Duchess of Malfi stripped back

THE text Bell Shakespeare is using for The Duchess of Malfi is a terrific distillation of John Webster's thrilling 1612 play.

The Duchess of Malfi

IN almost every way the text Bell Shakespeare is using for The Duchess of Malfi is a terrific distillation of John Webster's sprawling, maddening, thrilling, savage 1612 play. Hugh Colman and Ailsa Piper's 2006 version - here slightly tweaked - is mercilessly stripped back to essentials.

Gone are multiple secondary figures, plot byways and archaic references that might slow the thing down. What's left is a rush to death and perdition for the half dozen characters left standing: the Duchess of Malfi, her vile brothers the Judge and the Cardinal, her new husband Antonio, companion Julia and man-of-all-work Daniel de Bosola.

There's a price to pay, of course - there's always one, isn't there? The Duchess is now skewed more towards the vacillations of the blunt instrument that is Bosola (Ben Wood) than a deeper and wider view of a rank and diseased society where men rule by whim and appetite and woman are disposable. And with key scenes now cheek by jowl with one another, some of those changes of direction seem too unmotivated.

Bosola is played less as a man much wronged - he has spent seven years in the galley for a crime committed at the Cardinal's behest - than as someone to whom bad things just seem to happen. (Which is why the assigning to him of the opening speech, which Webster gave to Antonio, feels not quite right.) There is little guile or cunning in Wood's beefy, broad-accented portrayal, and for the most part he has the slightly stunned air of a bloke who has sucked a few too many tinnies and doesn't know quite which way to turn. It is effective, but a small tragedy, not a large one.

Still, the drama now burns very brightly. The widowed Duchess of Malfi is forbidden by her brothers to marry again. She chooses love over submission and is punished most vilely for it. Lucy Bell, directed by her father John, is incandescent, nowhere more so than in her death scene, in which she is by turns skittish, playful, desperate and, ultimately, transcendent. The compression of the play puts the Duchess's murder into Bosola's hands, and Wood is nowhere better than here, with Bell. Bosola is the instrument of the Duchess's death, but also eases her passage with deeply affecting blokey tenderness.

It takes a little time to get the measure of this Duchess. It opens in what is apparently an expensive but raffish contemporary nightclub, all black walls, side lighting and shady people. Composer Alan John has fun with some truly gruesome club music but it feels a miscalculation, giving an impression of sleaze rather than endemic, scarifying corruption. It's an impression that lingers too long, partly because in the tonally difficult part of The Judge - the Duchess's twin brother who loves her a bit too much and goes mad - Sean O'Shea is still discovering how to pitch his performance. Completing the cast, David Whitney is a suave, self-satisfied Cardinal; Matthew Moore's Antonio initially seems not quite impressive enough to gain the Duchess's heart but grows satisfyingly in stature; and Lucia Mastrantone gives Julia an enormous amount of amoral zest.

Once in its stride, Duchess persuasively deals with the many sexual encounters and grand guignol touches central to the piece - there's a heart-stopping solution to staging the trick by which the Duchess thinks Antonio dead - and the nearly two-hour, interval-free time races by. It perhaps may have been more accurate to call the text by its original name, however. Bell Shakespeare isn't staging Webster's The Duchess of Malfi - the adaptation was called Hellbent when Melbourne's Red Stitch performed it in 2006. It's a marvellously evocative and accurate description of a fascinating work.

The Duchess of Malfi
Bell Shakespeare. The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 11.
Tickets: $33-$72. Bookings: 02 9250 7777. Ends August 5.