Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play helped invent middle-class domestic drama. That should make it a shoo-in for a National Theatre revival. But director Katie Mitchell’s feminist edit of what is essentially a cheerfully misogynistic morality tale hailing from the sketchy dawn of psychological naturalism as we know it, misfires on all cylinders.
Updating the action to 1919, designers Lizzie Clachan and Vicky Mortimer split the stage into two upstairs/downstairs households. One is a crumbling stately home occupied by chinless gambler Sir Charles Mountford and his prim sister, the other the home of rising man of business John Frankford and his heavily pregnant wife.
You can see why: servants, domestic surveillance and claustrophobia are pivotal to the parallel plots in which Sir Charles (an excellent, repellent Leo Bill) shoots his friend’s beloved groundsman, while Frankford’s wife succumbs to the charms of his sponging best friend, Wendoll (Sebastian Armesto).
But Heywood’s flat, ornate seventeenth-century writing seems psychologically tone-deaf and ridiculously rhetorical when displayed in the sort of detailed class-bound setting that would work better for Ibsen. It doesn’t stand up well to this level of observational scrutiny, with everything from bloody sanitary napkins to furniture removal on perpetual busy display.
The servants are so busy – especially after Sir Charles loses his paintings and lampshades to lawsuits – that the restless production sometimes resembles a National Trust-sponsored episode of ‘Changing Rooms’.
The acting is good, brave then – towards the end of the interval-free two hours – dispirited. Paul Clarke’s piano score helps create a neurotic, tense atmosphere. But the women’s woes are ramped up in a play which has little sympathy with them.
Mitchell’s intelligent production ransacks Heywood’s 400-year-old drama for subtlety and feeling. But it’s a trial for the audience, many of whom seem in danger of being killed by boredom.