Speaking with others’ tongues: Creation Theatre’s The Duchess of Malfi
From the opening scene of John Webster’s Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the playwright establishes the action as taking place in a court rife with duplicity and insincerity. In his opening speech, Antonio expresses his admiration for the French court from which he has just returned, due to the king ‘quit[ting] […] his royal palace / Of flattering sycophants, of dissolute / And infamous persons’ in order to surround himself with those who will ‘Inform him the corruption of the times (1.1.7–9, 18) — the suggestion being that the same cannot be said of the court of Duke Ferdinand, in which he now finds himself. Ferdinand himself is described as the most duplicitous of all, however: Antonio suggests that ‘What appears in him mirth is merely outside’ and that ‘He speaks with others’ tongues and hears mens’ suits / With others’ ears’ (1.2.88, 91–92).
The idea of ‘speak[ing] with others’ tongues’ feels like an apt starting point for interpreting Creation Theatre’s live-streamed online production of Malfi, an adaptation which regularly — and overtly — speaks with the tongues of other genres, cultural touchpoints and even performance mediums. Whilst the audience experienced the production via Zoom, Malfi rarely if ever looked like a video conferencing call, even at the points at which the actors clearly appeared within their own windows. As the opening scene began, Delio (Andy Owens) and Antonio (Kofi Dennis) were framed in individual rectangles, but the image the audience saw was manipulated and filtered to ensure they didn’t appear in the now familiar grid of tessellated windows. Several other oblongs were also visible on screen as blocks of red, in which Bosola (Graeme Rose), the Cardinal (Giles Stoakley), Ferdinand (Dharmesh Patel) and finally the Duchess (Annabelle Terry) then proceeded to appear.
This choice pushed against the now-established convention of Zoom performance that actors turn their cameras on and off as they respectively enter and exit a scene — seasoned digital audience members used to seeing windows appear and disappear were forced to recalibrate this expectation. Just as significantly, the non-uniform positioning of the rectangles on the screen against a black background — their appearance as coloured geometric shapes when empty, and their tinting of the actors in a red filter when they entered — had the impact of transforming the entire scene into a living work of pop art. I was reminded in particular of Andy Warhol’s iconic screen prints: photographic faces looking out of their own frames, displaced from reality through blocks of colour, their features transformed into postmodernistically depthless shapes and patterns.
This opening scene also worked to establish the production’s cinematic aesthetic. The Duchess’s first appearance was soundtracked by Piero Umiliani’s ‘Crepuscolo Sul Mare’ (‘Twilight on the Sea’), originally heard on the soundtrack to Siro Marcellini’s 1969 Italian crime thriller La legge dei gangsters (Gangster’s Law), a film now assigned to relative obscurity. It’s far more likely that those in the audience — and indeed those behind the scenes at Creation — will have known the piece from its use on the soundtrack to Steven Soderbergh’s 2004 film Ocean’s Twelve (I know I certainly did). Directors Laura Wright and Natasha Rickman filtered Creation’s Malfi through the lens of 1960s cinema and popular culture, and Ocean’s Twelve provides a touchpoint for the postmodernistic ways in which they did this. The 2004 film is a sequel to Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a loose remake of a Rat Pack heist movie from 1960. Whilst Ocean’s Eleven updates the setting to the modern day, the film is saturated with a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of both Hollywood filmmaking and the Las Vegas strip through its visuals, characters and soundtrack. Ocean’s Twelve continues this sense, transporting the characters from the US to mainland Europe and adding touches of ’60s European cinema into the mix — such as by repurposing Umiliani’s ‘Crepuscolo Sul Mare’ and making the track its own.
All of which brings us back to Creation’s Malfi, which borrows the same piece once again. As a result, Umiliani’s guitar melody evoked both its original period and the manufactured nostalgia for the period characteristic of the Ocean’s movies, contributing to a Malfi adaptation filtered through the lens of mid-twentieth-century Italian cinema in its costumes, settings and musical choices, but knowingly so. In a manner which feels very of our lockdown moment, time crashed together: the play’s seventeenth century status, the production’s mid-twentieth-century aesthetic, and its existence in the here and now happening simultaneously. The result, combined with Malfi’s increasingly extreme and bloody plot, brought to mind the cinema of Quentin Tarantino: flagrantly repurposing and revising cinema, iconography, and even historical events to serve a particular directorial vision.
Whilst there were scenes throughout which manipulated the Zoom feeds of the actors individually, this was not the predominant manner in which Creation’s Malfi was streamed to the audience. The company promoted the production as ‘a delicious nightmare which plays with the boundaries of life and death, until we are no longer sure what is real’.¹ To achieve this sense of unreality, most scenes layered the actors’ individual feeds on top of each other into a single colour-filtered screen, giving the impression of the characters existing in the same space — but, importantly, without ever attempting to create the illusion that they actually were together. Apart from in a couple of pre-recorded scenes, the actors never appeared completely ‘solid’, allowing their images to overlap and bleed into one another. Wright and Rickman also played with perspective, having some characters appear in close-up whilst others were captured in mid-shots, utilising established filming techniques to distort the production’s sense of reality further.
This was used to particularly striking effect in their version of act 3 scene 5. In the play, Bosola re-enters partway through the scene with soldiers to escort the Duchess to be imprisoned in her palace. In adapting this moment, Wright and Rickman made the distinct choice to have Bosola enter not with soldiers, but with himself. By flipping Rose’s camera feed along a vertical axis and superimposing both versions over Terry’s feed, Bosola appeared twice as a surreal mirror image of himself flanking the Duchess, the two Bosolas blending into each other at several points. Terry stood further from her camera, making the Duchess appear smaller than the Bosolas who had come to arrest her, appearing imprisoned almost immediately as she became trapped between the two overlapping images of Rose.
The effect of literally having two colour-saturated images of Rose on screen at the same time again strongly evoked the pop art screen prints of Warhol, particularly in one instant where the dual Bosolas simultaneously pointed their fingers to indicate that the Duchess needed to come with them. In this moment, I was immediately struck by Rose briefly becoming a live digital recreation of Warhol’s Elvis I and II, an artwork made up of duplicated images of Elvis Presley. The production captured the artwork’s depiction, deconstruction and commodification of 1960s Hollywood celebrity — perhaps paralleled in Bosola’s selfish and materialistic motivations — whilst also subverting Presley’s archetypal heroic cowboy through Rose’s characterisation of Bosola as a stereotypical cinematic villain.
It was a moment which, for me, captured the approach of Creation’s Malfi perfectly: utilising pop culture iconography and aesthetics to create a surreally postmodern filter through which to pass the play. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrated how this production understood and sought to enhance and stretch the medium through which it was being performed. Creation’s version of Malfi recognisably spoke ‘with others’ tongues’ — those of twentieth century cinema and pop art, as well as traditional theatre and live television — borrowing from these liberally and overtly. Importantly, however, Creation avoided the duplicity and depthlessness of trying to perfectly imitate or recreate any of these existing mediums, instead incorporating elements of each into their digital performance with sincerity in order to advance this exciting and continually evolving new medium born out of the past year.
There are currently no further live performances of The Duchess of Malfi scheduled. However, Creation Theatre Company have scheduled a streamed performance on Monday 5 April 2021. Tickets are available on the company’s website.
The Duchess of Malfi
Presented by Creation Theatre Company via Zoom, 17–27 March, 2021. Directed by Laura Wright and Natasha Rickman. Stage management by Judith Volk. Video design by Stuart Read. With Annabelle Terry (The Duchess of Malfi), Dharmesh Patel (Ferdinand), Giles Stoakley (The Cardinal), Kofi Dennis (Antonio), Graeme Rose (Bosola), and Andy Owens (Delio).
