Pies and splosh in theatre

[frog]

From today's Guardian - sounds a bit arty but jelly can't be bad. See you in the crush bar:

"Mad excess … Charlotte Lucas and Jessica Raine in The Changeling.

The Changeling
by Middleton and Rowley
Young Vic, London

Until 25 February
Box office:
020-7922 2922
youngvic.org

I've never seen so many actors come out of the closet as during Joe Hill-Gibbins's production of Middleton and Rowley's 1622 classic. But that is less a reflection on the performers' sexual orientation than on the expressionist nature of Ultz's design, in which the Young Vic's breezeblock studio, the Maria, is crammed with boxes, wardrobes and cupboards from which the actors constantly emerge.

At first, I wasn't sure how well this strange, semi-surreal approach would work with a play set in Renaissance Spain and reeking of evil: even the background buzz of noise was irritating, suggesting someone had left the radio on nearby. But I was won over by a production that, like Declan Donnellan's 2006 version, suggests madness is the play's real theme. There is something visibly berserk about Beatrice-Joanna's love-hate obsession with De Flores, whom she hires to kill an unwanted prospective husband. It seems natural that the actors in the main story should reappear in the truncated sub-plot, in which a madhouse doctor's wife fends off her own suitors.

Everything in Hill-Gibbins's modern-dress revival exists at a tangent to normality. Jessica Raine's enticing heroine may look sane enough, but her constant criticisms of the "foul chops" of Daniel Cerqueira's perfectly decent-looking De Flores are edged with sexual neurosis. The production is unafraid to go for broke when it comes to physical action. De Flores, as proof he has committed the desired murder, presents Beatrice-Joanna with an unequivocally phallic finger. A wedding feast turns into a frenzied, robotic dance. And the bed trick, in which the heroine gets her maid to stand in for her on her wedding night, becomes a highly lubricious (and well-lubricated) spectacle in which a blindfolded Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Charlotte Lucas smear each other with jelly. This may not be the purest of Jacobean revivals but, in an uninterrupted 110 minutes, it captures perfectly the play's atmosphere of mad excess."