A teenage girl fidgets on a red-sheeted double bed, headphones jammed to her ears, laptop at the ready, her hair covered by a hood. She kicks her bare feet and twitches the duvet in time with the music, pausing only to lean over and put on a CD, absorbed in herself but stealing an occasional sly look at the audience. Behind her is a red wall with two doors, also painted red, and a row of movie posters. The house lights are still up, the play hasn't yet started, and already the audience, looking into this student bedroom, is locked into a performance of mesmerising authority from Lydia Wilson.
As Annabella, the young woman who commits incest with her brother in John Webster's 1633 play, Wilson, who only graduated from RADA in 2009, delivers a central performance of spellbinding intensity. This role in Declan Donnellan's latest Cheek by Jowl production deserves to take her already promising career to another level. In the opening scene with her brother Giovanni (Jack Gordon) she conveys a young woman for whom incest is just another lifestyle choice, like swapping a CD or pinning up a poster. Later in the play, pregnant with her brother's child, she plays with baby clothes, caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making between Giovanni and her husband Soranzo (Jack Hawkins). Wilson gives a very subtle performance in what is in many ways an unsubtle play.
Cheek By Jowl's annual visits to the Barbican as part of their global tour normally bring us Shakespeare, but the choice of a gory Jacobean revenge play by a lesser writer gives Donnellan a much greater degree of freedom to experiment. Ford's play has been trimmed to around two hours without an interval, losing the final gore-soaked pages of the closing scene in which minor characters take their turn to be bumped off. This happens after Annabella has been disembowelled and her brother has come on stage clasping her heart. It's a shame to lose the final line which gives the play its title, but the result is to speed up the action to good effect. The problem with the play's structure is that Annabella and Giovanni hardly appear together between their initial sexual encounter and the denouement; most of the play is taken up with subplots of lesser interest. Donnellan, whose normal method in the theatre is subtraction rather than addition, departs from his usual style by using a lot of music, movement and choreography, binding the actors together as a performing ensemble on and around the bed, before dividing them again. I feared briefly that this over-vigorous approach might swamp the actors and their words, but my nervousness wasn't justified. There are other standout performances from Suzanne Burden as the lusty widow Hippolita and from Laurence Spellman as the servant Vasquez.
It's a revenge tragedy of sorts, but one in which the wrong people seem to be taking revenge. Giovanni takes revenge on Annabella but the man who really has grounds for getting his own back -- the hapless Soranzo -- forgives his wife and is reconciled. Whatever the play's flaws, they are well disguised in this visually exciting production. Nick Ormerod's flair for restrained yet powerful design is well employed here; one of the doors at the back of the stage leads to a bathroom which doubles as a murder and torture chamber. There's a happy balance in this modern dress production between no-holds-barred gory realism and Cheek By Jowl's usually pared-down style, which provokes the audience into using their imagination.
The company's annual London run at the Silk Street theatre is, unfortunately, all too brief; in a few days time they will be in New York and then in Madrid after Easter. Donnellan is a wise old bird whose long years of experience as a director always seem to bear fruit without sliding into repetition of what's gone before. For my money, he's still the heir to Peter Brook. By that I mean he has created a theatrical language which is truly international while still preserving what's exemplary in the British stage tradition. Lydia Wilson's performance as Annabella is a good example of what that means.
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