Where did we get the idea that perversion, lust and violence are somehow inherently modern? Blood and sexual weirdness onstage is old, old, old—older than Seneca, older than Sophocles. And yet we persist in reductive, overexcited productions by directors who think they’re the first to figure out the resonance between, say, Titus Andronicus and Pulp Fiction. Cue a soundtrack to rage (rawr!) and tattoo your leading lady, and you automatically get Cheek by Jowl’s disappointingly thin, superficially youthful version of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
John Ford’s 1625-ish tale of passion between brother Giovanni (Jack Gordon) and sister Annabella (Lydia Wilson) does certainly teem with lust and revenge. Director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod chose the show for its thrills, so they radically edit the text and reimagine it as the fevered product of a goth-adolescent mind.
We enter to see Annabella lounging under her True Blood poster, a teenager fascinated with death and taboo. We never leave her messy bedchamber; if someone wants to yank someone’s eyes out in private, they use the en suite bathroom. Strenuously trying to seem punk rock, the show reeks from the effort, never more so than during the unconvincingly angry dance breaks. Valet-cum-assassin Vasques (Laurence Spellman) realizes that he’s playing a guignol farce: His scenes spark with stand-alone malice. Everyone else, though, seems lost. Petal-pretty Wilson and her lover, the shirt-averse Gordon, signal important moments by slowing down their text to the point where you can no longer. Parse. Their sentences. Execution here, certainly, is an issue. But it’s the ersatz rebelliousness that defangs the show—’tis pity, but it’s a bore.—Helen Shaw