Politicians are constantly warning us about the effects of violence in movies, video games and television on the young and impressionable.
But we are far from being the first society to have embraced a culture of blood. In the Elizabethan and, even more, in the Jacobean theater, blood, blood and more blood was everywhere. Even Shakespeare accepted that a tragedy that didn’t end up with a morgue-load of scattered corpses was somehow delinquent in its duty.
Later playwrights like John Webster and Cyril Tourneur gave their violence a kinky twist.
That admitted, I don’t think I’ve seen quite so much stage gore as positively dripped from the Sydney Theater Company’s production of “The White Devil,” just given at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Now, I am an admirer of the Sydney company, which I saw in its early days in Australia, and an enormous admirer of Webster – a master playwright who once gave a dying character the line “I have caught an everlasting cold” – and an on-and-off admirer of the director Gale Edwards.
When Edwards is good, she is very, very good. Remember her “Don Carlos” for the Royal National Theater at BAM only last season? But when she is not so good, well . . . she can give us Broadway’s recent “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
This time, with “The White Devil,” she seems to have been intrigued by the knavery, dazzled by the blood, but has an oddly tin ear for the bleak ashes-and-diamonds poetry of Webster.
And while most of her cast is good enough – in the case of Angie Milliken as Vittoria Corumbina, the wronged White Devil herself, and Michael Siberry as the unrelentingly vengeful Duke of Florence, better than that – the play has a strange weakness in its main character, the malcontent villain Flamineo.
As played by Jeremy Sims – although the concept must be at least as much the director’s as his own – this archetypal Jacobean creature is little more than an epicene comedian with no doom-hungry undercurrent of pure malice.
It’s a difficult role. Of all the many Flamineos I’ve seen, oddly enough it was another Australian, Sir Robert Helpmann, who, more than 50 years ago, was the best of the bunch. His viciously funny, lizardlike and glittering evil could make the phlegm curdle in your throat.
Talking of villains (and violence) brings me to Steven Berkov’s “Shakespeare’s Villains: A Masterclass in Evil,” at the Public Theater. Berkov has suggested that his self-indulgent performance has something in common with the Shakespearean recital acts of such actors as Gielgud or Redgrave.
Hardly. Berkov is a brilliant director and fascinating playwright. But his views on Shakespeare are primitive and here highly colored by an unnecessary envy of what he perceives as the British acting establishment.
But I bet he won’t say no to his knighthood, when it comes along in deserved due course!
His acting of Shakespearean excerpts – he calls them arias – is indeed villainous, distorted by clumsy mime, and made ridiculous by an antic humor. This is a show surely unworthy of one of the British theater’s outstanding talents.
