Next on:Sunday, 20:00 on BBC Radio 3SynopsisA new radio production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's Jacobean classic, set in Alicante, Spain, in the 1920s.Beatrice-Joanna is due to marry Alonzo e Piracquo, until she falls in love with Alsemero and seeks the help of her father's man, De Flores.Beatrice-Joanna ...... Anna MadeleyDe Flores ...... Zubin VarlaVermandero ...... Nicky HensonTomazo de Piracquo ...... Alex HassellAlonzo de Piracquo ...... Alex BlakeAlsemero ...... Simon MullerJasperino ...... Nigel HastingsDiaphanta ...... Liz RichardsonIsabella ...... Catherine BaileyAlibius ...... Philip FoxLollio ...... Stephen HoganAntonio ...... Piers WehnerFranciscus ...... Joseph Cohen-ColePedro ...... Rhys JenningsDirected and adapted for radio by Jeremy Mortimer.

The Changeling

It is noteworthy and inspiring that the English drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries and the generation which succeeded him until 1641 has witnessed an upsurge in popularity in the last 30 years and never more than in these early years of this twenty-first century, with a theatre next to the Globe in London specialising in such drama. Perhaps, as someone suggested, the English plays of this period speak to an audience of our times more readily than to readers or theatre goers of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Contemporary readers and theatre goers probably feel more empathy for the pessimism and crude cyncicism of the seventeeth century than would the mannered observors of manners of the eighteenth century or the romantics and religious revivialists of the nineteenth. I have now twice seen Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. As in the tragedies of Webster and Tourneur, the grotesque, farcical and tragic are interwoven. Put simply, it is hard to know to what extent the tragic in "The Changeling" (and this can be said too of the plays of Webster and Tourneur and Midleton's other tragedies) is meant to be taken seriously. Taken seriously, we lose the comic effect, taken as comic, the intrinsic unpleasantness of the story and the events and the psychology of the two principle protagonists wipes the smile from our face and leaves us uncomfortably wondering what the matter is with us that we find all this bizarre skulduggery entertaining. Dominic Dromgoole's production in the Globe in 2015 did not attempt to resolve the dilemma (is it possible to do so?) but stressed the ludicrous and farcical elements of the play and revelled in them. Seeing the play for the second time, I was struck even more forcibly than the first time with the extent to which the writer(s) were influenced by Shakespeare and especially Othello, whose lines are echoed throughout the play, and also by Webster. Beatrice Joanna is Desdemona had Desdemona been the adultress of Othello's desperate imagination; Beatrice is the very thing which Othello wrongly imagines Desdemona to have been. In other respects Desdemona and Beatrice are similar, in position, class and I am tempted to say character, at least in terms of their impulsive reaction to events which run out of their control. Beatrice employs Deflores (the name alone tells us that the authors will not allow us to take this play entirely seriously even if we wish to), a depraved Iago-Roderigo character to murder the man she does not want to marry in order to make the way clear for the man whom she does want to marry, at the price, as she with apparently unwitting irony puts it, of of her "honour". "Gothicy camp" is how a Time Out critic described the Dromgoole production, which is apt, but the bitterness of the underlying tale provides the play with more substance than many, including the Time Out theatre critic, seem to allow. There is an underlying resentment at the superficiality and barenness of wantoness, a puritan rejection of pleasure, a critique of the Latin style Spanish style court and intrigue, which it may not be fanciful to suggest, points the way to the Puritan revolution of 1641. Is this an explanation for the rift which underlies all Middleton's tragedies, I mean the rift between the enjoyment, the relishing of presenting human folly (Deflores is a villain but a comic villain) for our entertainment and laughter, and literally in this play as in the Duchess of Malfi through the presentation of Bedlam, parallel with the deadly serious Biblical injunction to "mend your ways" "shun sin" and to know that "summum peccati mors est"... the doomed Deflores and Beatrice die together at the end of this sordid but entertaining tale of lust, murder and chicanery, united in death in a cruel parody of Romeo and Juliet. Even the final words of the play record Shakespearean comedy, the final resolution, the completion of the circle. De Flores reveals "I coupled with your mate at barley break; now we are left at hell." and that he earned love out of murder.  This is neither entirely successful comedy nor entirely successful tragedy but it is successful literature and a fine piece of Jacobean drama, grotesque, threatening, hilarious, crude but never vulgar, and whatever its flaws and however excessive its parodying, fine theatre.

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