Someone starves to death, another stage manages his own execution. A person falls victim to a booby-trapped chair. And someone dies, as it says on the playbill, of a broken heart.
John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c1629-33), in a rare revival from Shakespeare’s Globe, sounds sensational. And of course it is. But it is also unlike more familiar Jacobean tragedies – it’s even quite distinct from Ford’s better-known ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, also recently revived in the Globe’s candlelit indoor theatre.
A thinker’s play
As Performance Monkey noted earlier this year, the opportunity to see a range of early modern drama makes clear how wide and wild a period that is. (As well as the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe, the RSC are in on the act too – programming Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and an even rarer Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, this spring).
What both Ford plays share is a sense that the demands that the world places on us – social, political, commercial – are simply impossible to bear. We all feel that sometimes, staring at the streetlight shadows in the smallest, loneliest hours – but Ford finds this a heart-sickening condition of his culture: that emotion and expediency cannot be squared, that desire cannot match duty, that life cannot be lived.
In ’Tis Pity, love turns inward, squirreling into a secret space away from a corrupt world – notably, the incestuous compact between Arabella and Giovanni. Michael Longhurst’s production this winter foregrounded its gaudy high-fashion sensibility, its wit and shocking pathos. Caroline Steinbeis, directing The Broken Heart, describes it as ‘a thinker’s play’ – in a programme interview, she suggests that Ford ‘seems to have an understanding of weight and melancholy; of that place in between that we can glimpse or feel for a brief moment before it’s gone.’
Hamlet gone wrong
What does that mean onstage? Ford set ’Tis Pity in a lurid contemporary Italy, but The Broken Heart in classical Sparta, where happiness is swiftly snatched away – from Penthea and Orgilius, whose betrothal is broken so that she can be married off to paranoid moneybags Bassanes; from Princess Calantha and the warrior Ithocles, who can’t even speak publicly about their love until far too late, when a ring is placed on a corpse’s finger. Fathers die, brothers meddle in their sisters’ wishes; the most you can hope for is getting out of the world asap.
Amy Morgan as Penthea. Photo: Shakespeare’s Globe
Some reviews worried about the tone, but Steinbeis’ balance between grim, giggle and peculiar seemed right to me. Her women were superbly withheld – Amy Morgan’s Penthea, in particular, moved stiffly, spoke remotely, as if she’s decided to be an effigy before the play begins. And the men were properly ridiculous – comic characters at the wheel of a tragedy. Owen Teale’s Bassanes is an OCD pantaloon with real-world consequences, and the excellent Brian Ferguson located Orgilius’ Hamlet-gone-wrong trajectory: student aspirations, problems with girls, disguise of questionable efficacy, vengeance which harms himself as much as anyone else. It made for a disquieting, unpredictable evening.
As I’ve noted before, each Wanamaker show takes a different approach to the theatre’s signature candlelight. Longhurst ramped up the emotional dynamics – swooping them up high, plummeting them daringly low, extinguishing them altogether, heightening the drama’s dynamic extremes. Steinbeis often pulls them up high, and keeps them there: characters inhabit a dun-toned pall, dulled like their unhappy circumstances.
Photo (top): Sarah MacRae in The Broken Heart. Photo: Bill Knight via theartsdesk
Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays
Leave a Reply