Barker, Middleton.
T.S. Eliot placed Thomas Middleton in the top rank among the great playwrights who blossomed in London four hundred years ago, all superb but overtopped by Shakespeare. He said Middleton depicted “the unmoral nature, suddenly trapped in the inexorable toils of morality — not made by man but by Nature — and forced to take the consequences of an act which it had planned light-heartedly.”
The Yale School of Drama currently offers a rare production of Middleton’s Women Beware Women, in an unusual reimaging by contemporary British playwright Howard Barker. Barker condensed about three and a half acts of the Middleton play into the first half of his contemporary collaboration, cutting heavily but leaving the story clear, speeding the action and enabling vivid performances.
The plot presents two cases of corruption: Leantio and Bianca, ingénues who eloped out of lust to live in poverty, each in turn seduced by a rich older suiter; and Hippolito, who beds his niece, Isabella. Livia — sister to Hippolito, pander for Bianca, and herself at last impassioned lover of Leantio — binds the stories.
Middleton’s characters are pleased with themselves and indifferent to sin, shallow even in their evil. No society so peopled can endure. All collapses in a grotesque final act, as the performance of a masque provides occasion for death by poisoned drink, poisoned arrow, trap-door impalement, and molten gold.
Barker discards that mechanical conclusion and takes the characters a different way in his second half. The lust which destroys order in Middleton awakens the self to false society in Barker. Sex as gateway to the personal present brings to life four figures from the cast, who conspire to wound their false world.
In the central role of Livia, Annie Hägg is beyond praise. Her delivery of Middleton’s verse demonstrates the clarity of meaning possible in rich speech when rhythm and tone consistently complement language. Her carriage and manner are just as well-suited, reminiscent of a Hollywood femme fatale (say Bette Davis in The Letter) transplanted to the Jacobean world.
The intensity of her coupling with Leontio transforms Livia from manipulator to iconoclast. Hagg retains her bearing while exposing her self. Barker provides her the language — rhythmic prose, not derivative but congruous in iambs and intricacy to Middleton’s verse — to summon a new spirit while remaining in character.
If no performance is so memorable as Hagg’s, each role is well-played and every aspect of the production impressive. The clowns of Middleton’s play, the Ward and his companion Sordido, are modernized in a way that makes them more credible in the first half than the text suggests, and more capable of their latter-half development. Likewise, Liantio and Bianca begin as entertaining caricatures of lasciviousness, then deepen into figures of intense ambition, passion, and cruelty.
The set is simple and suitable, judiciously enlivened by lighting and projections, with plenty of doors. The mixture of period and modern dress in the first half clarifies rather than confuses the situation. Music and movement are used to strong effect but not overdone. Women Beware Women runs through Friday at the Iseman Theater.
The second, modern, half of the play doesn't work for me. As established in the first, Middleton, half, every character is unsympathetic, and attempts by Barker to rehabilitate some of them so that that they can become the heroes/heroines of the Revolution are not entirely convincing. Middleton, who knew his characters best, had the right idea for them - kill them all.