It's Autumn Incest Season at the Pilch, with last week's brother love-in Moth being followed by one of the most notorious sibling sex plays of all time, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.
They're very different. Where Moth is brand new, 'Tis Pity is nearly 400 years old. Where Moth is about coming to terms with one death, 'Tis Pity features multiple gruesome murders before our very eyes. Where Moth has scenes of eating breakfast cereal, 'Tis Pity has people literally eating each other's hearts.
What unites these two plays is that they both have the courage to explore a taboo relationship, and make it the most innocent part of their story. That, and also these particular productions are both insanely brilliant pieces of theatre.
I have seen 'Tis Pity a couple of times before, and it is a challenge for any director. The outrageous violence and over-the-top sex scenes usually produce at best titters and often brazen guffaws from the sceptical audience. Not so with Yasmin Nachif's passionate and cool production.
Nachif (astonishingly directing for the first time) has the audience exactly where she wants them from beginning to end. A cast-wide makeup scheme of Pierrot teardrops on blanched, mask-like faces creates an aura of perverted pantomime. Expressionist staging makes the action all the more powerful by avoiding the awkwardness of semi-feigned reality. For example, the First Fatal Fuck of Annabella and Giovanni is often simply taken off-stage or done with some half-heartedly coy prodding. But here, the two lovers kneel motionless, locked eye-to-eye in perfect harmony, while all the other actors writhe, groan and pant around their bodies. It's thrilling, respectful and also genuinely sexual.
This bold, creative, visual style gives the whole show a fantastically macabre backdrop against which to play out its circus of horrors. Cups of wine spill garlands of sparkling streamers; paintbrushes stand in for swords, smearing blood-red paint on the victims' pure white shirts. The centre of the circular stage is like a morbid whirlpool, with characters constantly circling it and each other, always just a couple of steps from getting sucked into disaster.
This is all great stuff. But the real genius of this production is the way the exaggerated artifice of the visuals dovetails with the performances, which are direct, clear, and burning with emotion. It's almost as if the unnaturalness of the stagecraft has liberated the actors to make their characters glow with conviction and clarity.
George Loynes as Giovanni is a mass of Saturnine desire. He's like a 21-year-old David Tennant auditioning for an especially perverted version of Hamlet. Catty Boyce as Annabella somehow contrives to be both frail victim and committed rebel, as if she's auditioning for an especially perverted version of Juliet. Gilon Fox as the wife-beating cuckold Soranzo is frankly just terrifying, like a Nazi torturer just after he's locked the door and turned to smile at you. Susie Weidmann, in greyface and black robes, turns the servant Vasques into a Machiavellian Angel of Death.
But amazingly, the figure that evinces most sympathy is the one normally seen as nuttiest of the whole lot: Bergetto, played here by Jem Hunter as a kind of abandoned Harlequin hopelessly out of touch with the real world. Bergetto conventionally is a minor fool, and frankly it's quite a relief when he gets stabbed to death. But in this production he plays the role of an especially perverted (are you seeing a pattern emerging here?) Master of Ceremonies, bowing, cartwheeling, bringing scenery on and off, and even directly addressing individual members of the audience. Like Thersites in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, he almost feels like he's trapped in the wrong play, a gay man in a straight world, and his mistreatment by the other characters is cruel and degrading to watch. But it makes for great theatre.
The finale, with Hattie Wellock's Puttana being burned alive on stage, screaming in her death throes while George Eustace's Priest yells Christian blessings at the few surviving characters, is shockingly visceral and charged with the anger of pure satire. As Holly Johnson sang, we're living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods.
John Ford's play has been scandalising audiences ever since it was first performed in 1633. In that vast span of time, most productions have treated the central, incestuous relationship as wrong, just wrong. This is the first time I've felt that the author's original intention was for siblings Giovanni and Annabella to be the only thoroughly pure characters in the play, and it's the conventional members of society who are the real monsters. It's a powerful, counter-intuitive approach, but in this groundbreaking, wonderful production, it has the ring of truth. Incest, it seems, is best.