The Changeling, Young Vic, London

Charlotte Lucas (left) and Jessica Raine in 'The Changeling'

The Jacobeans’ appetite for strong theatrical meat – madness, incest, violence and gore – poses a challenge to modern audiences. Even those well versed in grisly, forensic detective dramas may balk at dripping human hearts, severed fingers and capering lunatics. Nonetheless, there is a sudden flurry of revivals, with London playing host over the next few weeks alone to The Duchess of Malfi (Old Vic), ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (Silk Street) and, here at the Young Vic, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling.

To director Joe Hill-Gibbins then the challenge of the lunatics’ masque, the severed finger and the ludicrous virginity test. His solution is admirably full-blooded. He gives the whole thing an expressionist twist, setting it in modern dress in some not quite definable institution. Ultz’s set is functional and strip-lit; he boxes the audience into little blocks of viewing chambers, so that they peer at the action in a rather voyeuristic manner. Meanwhile, inside the cage, the characters are the prisoners of a claustrophobic world and of their own impulses, and in Hill-Gibbins’ often thrilling staging, things unravel rapidly.

What possesses Beatrice-Joanna (a pale, increasingly unstable Jessica Raine) to ask her creepily infatuated servant to kill her unwanted fiancé so she can marry Alsemero, her true love? Desperation, perhaps. But that move made, it’s a downward spiral towards madness and death. De Flores (a grimly determined Daniel Cerquiera) scorns his mistress’s offer of money for his service: he wants sex. And though she is initially repulsed by him, she is soon trapped in some weird erotic pact. Lust and control make queasy bedfellows here, with Alsemero’s bizarre virginity test for his bride coming over as almost as perverted and nasty as De Flores’ manipulation of her.

Some choices work brilliantly. Hill-Gibbins’ decision to fuse the castle scenes with the sub-plot in the asylum underscores the all-embracing madness of the world. The whole production has an unhinged feel and expertly walks the line between horror and ridicule, with food standing in for blood and linking lust and death. The wedding night involves masses of red fruit jelly; the final gore-steeped death scene even more of the same.

What you lose is the sense of a particular society: a code-bound, strictly regulated milieu in which repression and frustration foster obsession and forbidden desires. And the hurtling pace blurs the arc of the play. But the excitable, anarchic drive to this production releases the disturbing force of this dark play.

4/5

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