On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Orpheus' and The Duchess' The Duchess of Malfi. By John Webster. Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton, with John Houseman. At the Phoenix. Orpheus...
...There is variety of wealth in Webster's phrases: Antonio, of his love: "Let all sweet ladies break their flattering glasses, and dress themselves in her...
...True, if he had kept out of the ladies' chambers...
...she determined to show how lewd a vagrant she could be...
...She died young...
...A medicine man brings in a skull to which some flesh still clings...
...the wild revenge of a villain redeemed too late...
...It is a story so overbalanced as to require delicate handling...
...In Orpheus Descending, the murk betrays us into mud...
...Orpheus Descending...
...Moronic or mooning witch-women clutter the stage...
...At the Martin Beck...
...Murky and magnificent, The Duchess of Malfi is a worthy addition to the great list of Phoenix revivals...
...The cast as a whole does well...
...Directed by Harold Cluxman...
...By Tennessee "Williams...
...Unfortunately, while Williams's trick of repetition continues, his physical and verbal violence wears no cloak of poetry...
...After Shakespeare's Macbeth, Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are the greatest of the blood-and-thunder plays...
...a dance of madmen playing upon her tormented spirit...
...What redeems a play of this sort is the beauty and power of the expression...
...Strip Hamlet of its poetry !) Here, too, only the Everest of Shakespeare overshadows Webster's heights...
...It is a hell of a world in which Williams wallows...
...Every worthy man is his own marble," says a dedicatory poem to The Duchess of Malfi, printed in 1623...
...Never rained such showers as these without thunderbolts i' the tail of them...
...there is a surge of pity with her death...
...Her husband kills her, and the wandering boy is being beaten to death by the sheriff's son as the curtain falls...
...Mine eyes dazzle...
...He tells a tale of being a chain-gang prisoner, tied to a post for a whole day—and boasts that he held his water...
...Spooner) the thud-and-blunder melodrama...
...Here we reach what may be called (with a bow to Dr...
...Orpheus is nowhere in evidence...
...A quickening sentence, within the drama's darkness and heavy doom, illuminates a soul...
...Whose throat must I cut...
...The storekeeper's wife has a past more hideous still...
...but there certainly is descent to an inferno...
...But Jacqueline Brookes, as the Duchess, grows in power through the evening...
...then he beds with the storekeeper's wife till the sheriff tells him to leave town...
...Here are sex and sadism in a scramble for the biggest score...
...The Phoenix Theater production, although uneven, reveals the power of The Duchess of Malfi...
...The villain Borsola, when the Duke pours out gold: "What follows...
...their gloom is never dispelled, but from instant to instant reinforced by the lightning flash of a phrase...
...and, indeed, at the Phoenix some of the audience tension toward the gruesome end was released as laughter...
...Its story of the two brothers, lord and cardinal, who in their covetousness kill their sister, her husband and her infant son, drawing still others down with themselves to death, is heightened with the devices of melodrama: a gory simulacrum of the husband displayed to the horrified wife...
...Or this still pertinent thrust: "A politician is the Devil's quilted anvil...
...The lusty vagrant who wanders in complains that all women consider him a stud...
...Earle Hyman, as her steward and husband, is a shade too gentle...
...there is little suggestion of power in his voice or in his acting...
...the warped meanderings of a mind overwrought with guilt...
...Presented by the Producers Theater...
...About them is the rush of torrid rain...
...A nymphomaniac explains that, having marched in protest against social injustice and having been arrested as a "lew!d vagrant...
...he fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard...
...The servants, of an intriguer caught in the palace with a pistol in his codpiece: "There was a cunning traitor: who would have searched his codpiece...
...And even Shakespeare has written no greater line of simple tenderness than wells from the Duke when he looks upon his twin sister, slain by his command: "Cover her face...
...They remain vivid, swirling and grim upon the stage...
...He carries a guitar—which gives occasion for offstage music at sentimental moments...
...The set, with two great stairways before the shuttered walls, with the black curtain that hangs like the shadow of impending doom, is a fit shroud for the drama's action...
...This gives occasion for the offstage baying of hoiinds in pursuit of an escaped convict, whose cries we hear as the dogs rend him...
...John Webster needs no greater memorial than his plays...
...Tennessee Williams proffers a grab-bag of the violence and lust that dominate his decaying and putrescent South...
...almost genteel...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
