RITA DI SANTO assesses the winners of the most politically charged festival to date
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Gore-filled Jacobean tragedy is a bloody mess
Gore fest: The Duchess of Malfi
[Helen Maybanks]
KATARZYNA KOSMALA introduces a retrospective by one of the most significant figures in contemporary US photography
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The Duchess Of Malfi
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
MARIA ABERG’S 2014 production of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil demonstrated that she is at home with that writer’s blood-soaked, nightmare world. There is certainly no shortage of blood in her treatment of Webster’s great companion piece The Duchess of Malfi.
The final scenes involve the cast wading around and rolling in a lake of blood to such an extent that many in the audience must have worried about the RSC laundry bills.
Whereas her earlier production reminded us of an Italianate US gangster fiefdom, this slimmed-down version of Webster’s other major tragedy has no sense of any social context in which the inane cruelties take place.
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