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Horror Times Two
| Article
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19517 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1991 |
1,826 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is a contributing editor to THE WORLD & I. |
Audiences that delighted in revenge tragedies like Titus Andronicus or The Jew of Malta or The Spanish Tragedy and its descendant Hamlet were not prone to justify these gory plays with rhetoric about art and the beauty of noble verse. These were applauded primarily for the blood and guts, ghosts, brutality, scenes in graveyards, mutilation, and other Senecan horror directly staged rather than narrated.
In one of those bizarre and rather funny metamorphoses wrought by time, such gruesome entertainments are now considered to be high art. Critical fashion is to ignore their deliberately foul content and concentrate instead on their accoutrements and production values. No less a critic than T.S. Eliot praised the work of John Webster, but unlike Eliot, I have never been a fan of plays like The White Devil. A sumptuous staging of it at the Royal National Theatre's Olivier auditorium did nothing to change my mind; rather, it caused me to wonder why the piece has been consistently popular since it was first played at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell in 1612.
The White Devil
The White Devil is bloody in the extreme, a display of human turpitude that would be rivaled in our century only by real life. The plot is a complicated tangle of murders, betrayals, and cruelties based on a series of real murders in sixteenth-century Italy. Brachiano, a lecherous duke, is married to Isabella but fancies the beautiful Vittoria, sister-in-law of his villainous secretary, Flamineo. The Duke beds Vittoria, while Flamineo arranges for Isabella to be poisoned. Vittoria is hypocritically tried for adultery and condemned to a "house of penitent whores." Flamineo then kills his own brother, leaving Victoria free to marry Brachiano, who secures her release for the wedding.
The ghost of Isabella calls on her brother Francisco to avenge her murder, and he poisons Brachiano. Amid other twists and turns, at the end Flamineo feigns remorse at his evil ways. He offers pistols to Vittoria and her servant so they can kill him. But the pistols are loaded only with powder, and the women fire at him to no effect. Flamineo laughs too soon, however, because two of Brachiano's friends arrive to finish him off and kill Vittoria. No one of any importance is left alive.
Philip Prowse has directed and designed The White Devil as a glittering tidal wave of gloom. The setting is a vaultlike interior whose copper-colored brick cathedral walls arch up into darkness. The women are
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