Abstract
Ford’s The Broken Heart is a bewilderingly spectacular and at times horrifying play. Written around 1629 for performance by the King’s Men, it is one of the more sensational tragedies in the later Jacobean and Caroline period. Following revivals of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and The Broken Heart’s near-contemporary Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP), the decision to stage this slightly earlier Ford play in the dimly lit indoor space made sense and had immediate appeal. This was a production that seemed likely to follow the same formula of dark comedy and atmospheric intensity as those tragedies that had already garnered the approval and applause of critics in the Globe’s new venue. It was something of a disappointment to see this opportunity go unfulfilled in Caroline Steinbeis’s realization of the play, then, in a revival that seemed to rely on the novelty of its performance and staging as its main attraction, and a retelling which chose overstatement as its main mode of expression.
This is not to say that the production wasn’t enjoyable to see staged, and there were some memorable moments and strong performances. Brian Ferguson as Orgilus played a wonderfully feigned eccentric scholar, speaking to himself and exclaiming whilst seated amongst the audience in the pit during the scene in which he eavesdrops on his sister and her favoured suitor. Having just played the part of Antonio in The Changeling, the disguised fool in Alibius’s lunatic asylum who plays out his deceit in order to woo Alibius’s wife, this kind of cross-production ‘doubling’ had a pleasing and humorous resonance. Amy Morgan as Penthea shone through as the star of the production, small of stature and ferocious, increasingly stern as she learnt to manipulate the nobleman she is persuaded to marry: her atrociously jealous husband Bassanes was played here with startling intensity by Owen Teale. Sarah MacRae’s Calantha was goddess-like – tall, poised, with tumbling golden hair – and the wild and extreme dance that she enacted when she heard of the deaths of her father, Penthea, and Ithocles, was extraordinary, dazzling and bizarrely moving.
But too often the production seemed to rely on spectacle or conspicuous symbolism, rather than lean on the actors’ talents in bringing this challenging plot to life. This tendency became clear early in the production when Penthea entered wearing a metal corset over a red, visible bodice, her lower half bound in and encircled by a hooped petticoat. Around her neck was a black lace-effect metal ruff with a lockable collar, around her wrists were handcuffs, and on her head a metal hairpiece. Rarely has a costume said so much, or so overtly. Not only did this chastity armour laboriously spell out Penthea’s sexualized but caged status and her relationship with Bassanes, it also looked ridiculous. Elsewhere, decisions about the staging of characters seemed hackneyed and worn. Joe Jameson provided comedy in his portrayal of Nearchus, a camp character with long blonde hair, a thin moustache and lace-adorned collar. His delivery of the (unscripted) line ‘well hello, Sparta’, arms flung outwards in self-congratulation, was very funny but did not feel like a particularly new or interesting tactic given James Garnon’s side-splittingly hilarious and endearing Flashheart-esque Bergetto in Tis Pity She’s a Whore (see Neil Allan’s review in Cahiers Élisabéthains 87, Spring 2015, 113–15).
This level of hilarity came to be starkly contrasted with nauseating horror, when Orgilus, condemned to death for having murdered Ithocles, patiently bled to death onstage, the blood audibly splashing down the spears he held to support his body and running into large copper pans. The sound it made, over the length of the scene, was gloriously sickening. But this gesture towards a kind of brutal realism did not last long, as the final scene returned the production to the realm of overdone representation, in a beautiful masque-like sequence in which Calantha was strapped into a huge golden breastplate and a pair of enormous wings flown down from the heavens, the body of her dead lover Ithocles (miraculously) standing (or propped up) next to her. The contrast between the quiet pathos in the moment that Calantha died of a broken heart, symbolically wrapped in her angelic, queenly costume and the unremittingly gruesome sound and spectacle of a man with his wrists slit, was strange and perhaps strained.
Given the visual indulgences afforded by this production it was unfortunate that the diabolical chair provided little in the way of interest or effect. In many of the scenes a magnificent and bulky throne featured, painted gold and black to match the decor of the playhouse, but this turned out to be a decoy. Orgilus’s trap, when it appeared, was plain and slight, a simple chair with automatic handcuffs attached to the arms. In an effort to ensure the audience had no idea what was coming, this most theatrical of props became underwhelming and managed to lack drama. Whilst the production’s general oeuvre bordered on the grotesque, full of all-out embellished spectacle and tricks, the overall effect lacked the slickness that previous SWP productions have claimed. This was an interesting and worthwhile foray into the world of The Broken Heart, but one that seemed somehow piecemeal, and which failed to articulate the depth and visceral darkness of Ford’s fascinating play.