When it premièred in 2019, director / dramatist Zinnie Harris said that “this #MeToo age of feminist uprising in the face of toxic masculinity… feels like the perfect time to revisit this incredible, brutal story of female determination in the face of patriarchal power”. Now her play comes to London with the same designer but a new cast led by Jodie Whittaker making her first return to the stage since playing Antigone at the National Theatre in 2012, is it still as relevant?
Harris’s version follows the main lines of Webster’s plot with some tweaks and losing much of the detail. People speak in a modern vernacular: “I don’t suppose you’ll suck my cock,” say the Duchess’s Cardinal brother to another man’s wife, while the Duchess herself explains “consummate” to her newly married husband as “f**k[ing] each others’ brains out”, though sometimes, especially when characters soliloquise, the language becomes more literary.
A breakdown on the Underground made me miss the opening when I was told the Duchess (here called Giovanna) laughed in the face of her brothers when they tried to dictate her behaviour. She is recently widowed and they want to ensure she stays single: a husband and children would interfere with their hopes of inheritance.
Jodie Whittaker’s Duchess is confident and independent, her own woman, and when attracted to her gentle and sympathetic steward, Antonio (Joel Fry), it is she who seems to initiate their romping in bed. “Enjoyment in loving is never wrong,” she declares but regularises things by suggesting marriage, though Antonio is concerned at their difference in station.
A wedding ceremony is quickly conducted by her waiting woman, Cariola (Matti Houghton). Her union outside her own brings down her brothers’ condemnation when they find out about it through Bosolo, the minion whom they have introduced as a spy in her household.
The enactment of punishment and revenge that follows is gruelling. Tom Piper’s monochrome set with its metal stairs and gallery and sliding mesh walls hints at an asylum or the prison it turns into where Giovanna is under surveillance and psychologically tortured by fake videos showing her husband and son being riddled by bullets and her daughter sobbing her heart out, crying for her mother.
Webster moves the action to different locations, but in fact, though the incarceration becomes increasingly specific, the Duchess has ben entrapped right from the start here.
Paul Ready’s Cardinal is voluptuously decadent, having sex halfway through preparing Mass; like his vestments, his smooth demeanour is a covering for evil, while his younger brother, Ferdinand (Rory Flick Byrne), with his incestuous fantasies about his sister (perhaps they were real once), starts mad and become increasingly so.
Bosola’s unswerving devotion to duty to those who treat him so badly seems at odds with modern life, and Jude Owulu gets little chance to suggest the underlying compassion that will eventually break through
Though Giovanna makes a stand against the way men treat her, Cariola and Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress, have even less chance to stand up against men, so it is left to their ghosts to wreak their revenge. Though, like Julia’s husband Delio (Hubert Burton), who reveals his feelings for Antonio, they show us different aspects of loving.
Is this a play for today? It has no telephones or electronic communications, though the Cardinal does seems to brandish some kind of taser. Perhaps we should not take it as contemporary, though like Webster’s original a sensational picture of brutal misogyny. There are moments of hope in this version of The Duchess when Ben Omerod’s cold lighting glows warmer, and today we need more of that: a positive picture that recognises progress and waves a flag for the future.