'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Oxford Playhouse (From The Oxford Times)

'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Oxford Playhouse

2:39pm Wednesday 8th February 2012 in Theatre By Christopher Gray

The Grand Guignol climax to John Ford’s Caroline revenge tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore comes so close to ‘designer violence’ as sometimes to provoke more laughter than fear from those watching.

There is no risk of that with Declan Donnellan’s shattering revival of the play for Cheek by Jowl, which is packing in audiences at Oxford Playhouse this week.

Expertly tailoring the piece to this company’s much-lauded ensemble style, Donnellan trims more than a third from the usual three-hour running time, with dancing and music (Nick Powell) to speed things on their way.

The flabby subplot involving one of ‘heroine’ Annabella’s many suitors, Bergetto, is jettisoned altogether, thereby focusing attention on the incestuous relationship with her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon) at the centre of the drama. Ford’s notoriously sympathetic account of the genesis of their affair makes it understandable, if not forgivable.

The fully in-control Annabella (Lydia Wilson) we meet here is shown to be as eager to transgress as he, an eye-popping reminder of the writer’s daring departure from the notion of the submissive woman.

The action throughout takes place in her dimly lit (Judith Greenwood) poster-lined bedroom (designs Nick Ormerod), dominated by a bed on which, more than once, almost the entire 12-strong cast are crammed to witness the ‘intimate’ activities.

The observers are not really ‘there’, of course, but are conjured into being, one supposes, in the fevered imagination of a young woman undergoing a powerful sexual awakening. As with Juliet’s complicit Nurse, the encouragement of Annabella’s confidante Putana (Lizzie Hopley) — comically seen squirting the sheets with air-freshener after the siblings’ first encounter between them — adds a further distasteful element to the story.

This eager pander is to pay a terrible price for her knowledge when Annabella becomes pregnant and her new husband Soranzo (the excellent Jack Hawkins, so recently a star of the Oxford student stage) sets out to discover the identity of the father. He has the ideal agent in the serviceable villain Vasques (Laurence Spellman), who has already proved so useful in subverting the poisoning plot against him planned by his jilted mistress Hippolita (Suzanne Burden).

Again exploiting his potent sexuality, Vasques worms out the secret from the pouting, simpering Putana, thereby propelling her — and the play — towards a bloody conclusion. Until Saturday. 01865 305305. (www.oxfordplayhouse.com)