‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

By inviting the great European company Cheek by Jowl to present their sensational version of this Jacobean blood-and-guts epic, the Sydney Festival has delivered a rich, fresh transfusion to local actors and directors. Let’s hope they catch one of the 5 performances.

Stripping away all unnecessary clutter — in sets, costumes, ‘classical’ acting, intervals, etc — director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, founder/leaders of the company since 1981, give a pounding, non-stop and utterly comprehensible version of Ford’s lusty 1630 ‘revenge tragedy’. Sense and motives are made crystal clear by the dozen expert actors who rarely leave the stage, sharing the main roles and acting/singing/dancing as chorus/spectators.

The action all happens in Annabella’s modern-day bedroom. Marvellously played by Lydia Wilson, she’s the young, tattooed, much admired daughter of a rich Italian business man. All the local eligibles are after her hand but she — alas for all concerned! — is hot only for her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon). The siblings see their actions on the red central bed as pure and simply wonderful: the rest of society soon see her as the ‘whore’ of the famous title. An incestuous pregnancy forces a swift marriage with the unsmiling Soranzo (Jack Hawkins).

Wilson and Gordon speak the complex language with great simplicity and truth: the narrative is always brilliantly clear. There’s also excellence from the surrounding cast, especially Laurence Spellman as Soranzo’s lurking man-servant Vasques and Lizzie Hopley as Annabella’s ditsy maid who spills the beans and so has her tongue bitten off and her eyes coat-hangered out by a strip-o-gram murderer. The blood flows free and the gripped audience duly gasps, laughs and shudders.

Frank Hatherley 

Photographer: Prudence Upton.

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