Theatre

You wonder, if this was one of the most popular plays to be seen in London in 1800, what else was on. The Romantics aren’t known for their dramas, and perhaps this excruciating production of Joanna Baillie’s study of male melancholia is a fair indication of why.

It’s straight gothic, in that what everybody lacks in dimensions they make up for in frills, honour and angst. De Monfort is a nobleman, naturally, wracked with an entirely unaccountable, and unaccounted for, fury. ‘’Gainst reason, ’gainst nature,’ he has loathed the upstanding Rezenvelt since boyhood. And the very groundlessness of his rage is what pushes him to bloody deeds, in a wood, with screeching owls aplenty and a handy abbey nearby.

It’s not just the central premise that proves painful. Alice Barclay does her best, but Jane De Monfort is so angelically devoted to her brother she’s impossibly dull. A clutch of subplots – poor fellow arrives to wreak havoc, ageing countess decides to besmirch Jane’s honour – arrive only to run off, into the night, with the owls. And the abbey, aside from being mixed sex, is the busiest cloister in Christendom. It’s not a disaster. Baillie’s antique poetry is easily as meaty and moonlit as Byron’s, and Imogen Bond’s spirited cast hammer it at the gruesome, full-throttled pitch it demands. But this high-gothic psychodrama is just too thoroughly improbable to be played out in such close quarters with such a very straight face.