MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray
Gore-filled Jacobean tragedy is a bloody mess
Gore fest: The Duchess of Malfi
[Helen Maybanks] 
The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years
GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead
GEORGE FOGARTY relishes the music of black British artists that channels Carribbean, Latin and club sounds, along with contemporary west African radicalism
CHRIS SEARLE hears the ordeal of the Palestinian people in the improvised musicianship of a UK jazz trio
DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
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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