The Duchess of Malfi Production 2014

CAST & CREW

CHARLOTTE QUINNEY - THE DUCHESS

FERDINAND - JAMES BLOOR FERDINAND - JAMES BLOOR

Charlotte’s other acting credits include: A in Terminus by Mark O’Rowe; Juno in Dido Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe (dir. Michael Oakley); Valentine in Pembroke Players Japan Tour 2013 – The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare; Polonius in [Lady] Hamlet by William Shakespeare; Babakina in ANTON: Ivanov by Anton Chekhov; Nercissa in ETG 2012: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare; Girl in The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter adapted by Bryony Lavery and was part of the ensemble in Enron by Lucy Pebble. Charlotte is a third year English student.

James’s other acting credits include: James’s other acting credits include: Sergestus Dido Queen Cartage Christopher Sergestus in in Dido Queen of of Cartage by by Christopher Marlowe Michael Oakley); Davey Jerusalem Marlowe (dir.(dir.

Michael Oakley); Davey in in Jerusalem by by Butterworth; Henry That Face Polly Stenham; JezJez Butterworth; Henry in in That Face by by Polly Stenham; Leatherhead in Bartholomew Jonson Leatherhead in Bartholomew FairFair by by BenBen Jonson andand he he performed in the Footlights’ Spring Review 2012: Donors. performed in the Footlights’ Spring Review 2012: Donors. wrote performed own show SPLIT at the He He alsoalso wrote andand performed his his own show SPLIT at the ADC is performing in the Footlights’ Spring Revue ADC andand is performing in the Footlights’ Spring Revue 2014: History of Everything.

James is doing MPhil 2014: TheThe History of Everything.

James is doing an an MPhil in Political Thought Intellectual History. in Political Thought andand Intellectual History.

BOSOLA - PAUL ADEYEFA Paul’s acting credits include: Horse Courser in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (dir. Drew Mulligan); Bertil in ADC/Footlights Pantomime 2013: The Princess and the Pea by Ben Pope, Ryan Ammar and Hellie Cranney; Friar/Elbow/ Abhorson in CAST 2013: Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare; Orsino in Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare; Belize/Mr Lies in Angles in America – Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner; Robert in Company by George Furth, Music and Lyrics

by Stephen Sondheim; Banquo in Pembroke Players Japan Tour 2012 – Macbeth by William Shakespeare; Bernard in The Boy in the Band by Matt Crowley; Alan Campbell/Mr. Erskine in The Picture of Dorian Gray by John Osborne and Mike in Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson. Paul is a fourth year Theoretical Physics student.

ANTONIO - HENRY JENKINSON Other acting credits include: Lucifer in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (dir.

Drew Mulligan); Barbra Zier in ADC/Footlights Pantomime 2013: The Princess and the Pea by Ben Pope, Ryan Ammar and Hellie Cranney; Cast in One Million Tiny Plays About Britain by Craig Taylor; Promotheus in Cambridge Greek Play 2013: Promotheus by Aeschylus (dir. Helen Eastman); Agamemnon in Orestia by Alex McKeith; Mr Twit in The Twits by Roald Dahl adapted by David Wood; Lingk in Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet; Radames in AIDA

by Elton John and Tim Rice and Angelo in The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare (dir. Michael Fentiman).

He is also a member of National Youth Theatre and completed RADA Young Actor’s Summer School. Henry is a second year Music student.

CARDINAL - MARK MILLIGAN

CARIOLA - KIM JARVIS

Other acting credits include: Lloyd in Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale; Ensemble in ETG 2013: Richard III by William Shakespeare and Ganymede in Dido Queen of Cartage by Christopher Marlowe (dir.

Michael Oakley). He has also written work that has been performed in HATCH. Mark is a first year English student.

Other acting credits include: Bec in 4000 Miles by Amy Herzog; B in Terminus by Mark O’Rowe; Joyce in The Ruffian on the Stair by Joe Orton; Guildenstern in [Lady] Hamlet by William Shakespeare; Deidre in Last Among the Long Grass by Freddie Crossley; Becky Shaw in Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo; Pennyfether in Killing Other People by M.J.P Campbell and Menenius in Coriolanus by William Shakespeare. Kim is a third year Theology student.

DELIO - WILL PECK

JULIA - EMILY DANCE Other acting credits include: Mrs Parsons in 1984 by George Orwell adapted by Matthew Dunster; Dawn in Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth; Director in The History Boys by Alan Bennett; Mary in Last Among the Long Grass by Freddie Crossley; Earnait McLeod in Kind by Isobel Cohen; Thomasina Coverly in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard; Jessie in It’s Complicated by Daniel Henry Kaes; Beatrice in A View from the Bridge

by Arthur Millar and Elmire in Tartuffe by Molliere. Emily is a third year English student.

Other acting credits include: Parsons in 1984 by George Orwell adapted by Matthew Dunster; Welton in And The Horse You Rode In On by Tom Stuchfield; Julia in Pembroke Players Japan Tour 2013 – The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare; Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet; Andrey in ANTON: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov; Humphrey in Esio Trot by Roald Dahl adapted by Ryan Ammar; Cast in An Italian Straw Hat by Eugene Labishe, translated by Kenneth McLeish; Orestes in Orestia by Alex MacKeith; Kirk in Burnt By The Sun by Peter Flannery; Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II by William Shakespeare; Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley by Phyllis Nagy and Oswald/Burgundy in ETG 2011: King Lear by William Shakespeare. Will is a third year History and Philosophy of Science student.

MALATESTE - KYLE TURAKHIA

SILVIO - MARCO YOUNG

Other acting credits include: Dr Maudsley in Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale and Harry/Vicar in Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn. He also codirected a production of Tartuffe by Molliere at Emmanuel Queen’s Building. Kyle is a fist year English student.

Other acting credits include: Thomas Beckett in Murder in the Catherdral by T.S Elliot; Father in Five Kinds of Silence by Shelagn Stephenson; Roland Maule in Present Laughter by Noel Coward and Appolonius in The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. He will also be playing Appolonius in the Edinburgh Fringe run of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood this summer.

Marco is a first year English student.

CASTRUCCIO - ROBBIE TAYLOR HUNT

GRISLON - HENRY WILKINSON Other acting credits include: Envy in Faustus by Christopher Marlowe; Knight/Tempter in Murder in the Catherdral by T.S. Elliot and Mr Blue/Cop in Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino. Henry is a first year Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic student.

Other acting credits include: Party Guest in Mercury Fur by Philip Ridley; Titov in Little Eagles by Rona Munro; Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard and Pentheus in The Bacchae based on Euripides. His other production credits include fight choreography for 1984 by George Orwell adapted by Matthew Dunster; Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster.

THE TEAM Director

Film Producer

ISABELLE KETTLE

JORDAN MITCHELL

...

As Director: Becky Shaw, (Corpus Playroom) The Bloody Chamber, (ADC) The 24 Hour Plays, (ADC) The Pembroke Players Japan Tour 2013 (Assistant Director) As Actor: Mrs Welsh (Blue Stockings), Veronica Vallon (The God of Carnage), Nurse (Dido Queen of Carthage) Producer

LEYLA MCLENNAN

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Frame 312, The King and Queen of the Universe (Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Last Among the Long Grass, Blue/Orange, Becky Shaw Stage Manager

HEN HAMMANT

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As Stage Manager: Alcestis (ADC), The Ruffian on the Stair (Corpus Playroom), Riverside Drive (Corpus Playroom) As Production Manager: Dressing Down (Edinburgh Fringe Festival) Costume Designer

YASMIN HAFESJI

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As Costume Designer: 1984 (ADC), Richard III (European Theatre Tour), Jitters (Corpus Playroom) Costumes Assistant

TOSCA TIZZANO

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As Costume Designer: Little Eagles (ADC), Jitters (Corpus Playroom), The History Boys (ADC) Lighting Designer

EMILY LUTHENTUN

...

Cinematographer: 1984 (ADC) Technical Director

JACK SWANBOROUGH ...

As Technical Director: Blue Stockings (ADC), The Penelopiad (ADC) As ASM: ADC/Footlights Pantomime 2013 Fight Choreographer

SAM BRAIN ...

Previous choreography work: Mercury Fur (Corpus Playroom), What the Butler Saw (Corpus Playroom), Jerusalem (ADC) Assistant fight choreographer

ROBBIE TAYLOR HUNT ...

Previous choreography work: 1984 (ADC), Shoot coward! (Corpus Playroom) Publicity Designer

ANTHONY BAYLIS ...

Blue Stockings (ADC), What the Butler Saw (Corpus Playroom) Cinematographer

GEORGE KENWRIGHT ...

This is George’s first Cambridge Show

...

As Lighting designer: Are you sitting comfortably (ADC) Death and the Maiden (Corpus Playroom), When The Rain Stops Falling (ADC) As Technical director: Faustus (Queens’ College), The Man of Mode (Covent Garden Drama Studio)

...

This is Anna’s first Cambridge Show

Publicity Manager

Programme Designer

RACHEL HUNTER

OLIVER BALDOCK

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As Producer: Blue Stockings (ADC), PICK ME UP (Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Did You Say No Though?

(Corpus Playroom)

Assistant cinematographer

ANNA THORPE

...

Graphic Designer www.oliverbaldock.com oliverbaldock@gmail.com

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

Looking back through my rehearsal notes I recently found a page entitled: ‘What we think the play is about’, written on Day 1. Underneath it lies the following list: Lust, Morality, Corruption, Obsession, Guilt, Choice, Justice, Power - one word from each member of the cast. Whether you do or don’t know the play, you will probably recognize that it is words like ‘lust’ and ‘power’ which make the The Duchess of Malfi appealing to readers, audiences and actors alike.

It is, whether we like it or not, the sex, the violence and the gothic-ness of it all that make lots of us want to watch Webster.

Isabelle Kettle, Director

On the other hand, you might read that list and think we were all entirely misguided. And I agree with you. Having rehearsed with this text and this company for the last four weeks, I now think entirely differently about the play – and I imagine the cast too would have a harder time confining their sense of the play to terms which now feel rather limiting.

So if you had to force me to choose one word, it wouldn’t be any of those you see at the top of the page. I would have to tell you that for me this play is about love. Love. What a huge and terrifying and marvellous idea. Whether we see it in the love between the Duchess and Ferdinand, or in the Cardinal’s thirst for power, or in Julia’s sexual relationships, Webster shows us love and our desire to be loved in all its strangeness , pain, vulnerability and loveliness.

It is this quality which shows me that for all the critics of

Webster’s slightly sinister, crazed, and violent play, The Duchess of Malfi is entirely real. I firmly contend that Webster hits the perfect balance: he gives us the tension, the excitement and the gore, but he also makes it human. He is Tarantino, Scorsese and the Bronte’s rolled into one. Yes, the violence can be shocking, morbid and even disgusting, but what heightens it is the fact that we see the perpetrators and victims within the play as entirely human.

I realise that to liken the playwright to a Scorsese film gives this company quite a lot to live up to, but feeling wide-eyed in the face of great artists is no new feeling. For a group of students to take on a play that stands at over three hours long as writ (don’t worry, we’ve cut it) and which has such a famous performance history can be thoroughly intimidating for all of us. Yet I have realised more and more along the way that as soon as we forget these fears we can suddenly do much better work and have a much better time. This approach has also governed the way we have grappled with the text – bringing to it an irreverence that is fuelled by our love for the totally glorious language and characters.

So what you will see tonight is our version of The Duchess of Malfi. We have read the relationships afresh, without thinking about what idea our audiences may hold of the Duchess, of her twin brother Ferdinand, or of anyone else.

We have used the bits of the script that make sense to our

telling of the story. We have approached this play as a text – not as an incredibly well known, much performed classic – and as a result the product we have emerged with is, I hope, entirely our own. In fact, it cannot possibly be anyone else’s. Ultimately, our golden rule has been never to anticipate and never to decide what is the ‘right’ reading, but to play our sense of the truth in every scene and every relationship, freeing ourselves from ideas of what this ‘should’ be. We are working on instinct and sometimes are as much in the dark as the Duchess in her prison.

So I suppose part of the joy of The Duchess of Malfi is that we just don’t have a clue what it is about. It makes complete sense to me, for the very reason that it makes no sense at all. The characters have some moments of utter clarity, and others of complete confusion. And in this regard Webster’s play seems to mimic life in a wonderful way. Our lives, as he puts it, are stumbled through in “a general mist of error.” None of us have any idea what we are doing half the time (or at least I don’t), and it has been so challenging and refreshing to find a play that makes us feel like we are dealing with a tiny intensified capsule of our uncontrollable, mad lives. Just as life is totally and brilliantly bizarre, unexpected and predictable, this production has consistently tried to embrace that spirit of uncertainty. I am ready to be surprised.

PUTTING THE PLAY IN CONTEXT “You see what power lightens in great men’s breath.”

Fastidious historical accuracy has not been a concern of this production. Rather, we have chosen to set Duchess of Malfi in 1930s Italy because we feel that the most important themes of the play resonate with the social, cultural, and political particularities of the time. In this sense, we have used fascism as a concept to focus Webster’s text, distilling within it the power-politics of charismatic leadership, the legitimate use of terror and violence, and the ideals of gender and bloodpurity. What better context to crystallize these themes than in the atmosphere of one of the first modern police-states, underpinned by the ideology of the Great Man? The recognisably modern context of this production draws our attention to horrifying home-truths; that the Duchess comes so easily to life in Fascist Italy reminds us that it was not only in some dusty, far-off Renaissance world that women were expected to subordinate themselves so completely to the designs of the patriarchy. Likewise, a politics built on blood, charisma, loyalty, and repute shows its fragility in the complicated networks of masculine control, ultimately upheld by a charismatic leader. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the modern police-state seems to be a perfect example of how appealing and destructive violence can be.

Naturally, however, using a concept to sharpen certain dimensions of the play will mean that it blurs others. There are moments which have a distinct air of the Renaissance about them, and where these feel unnecessary or unhelpful to our interpretation of the play, we have let them go.

You will not see caricatured old crones or madmen, nor will this production deal in the supernatural. Yet we have embraced the religious element of the play because it is so central to many of the characters’ perspectives on the world. Fascism had a confused and confusing relationship with religion, and demagogic politics in one-party states have, of course, been aptly compared to theocratic dogma. We are not trying to suggest that the Italian fascist leaders were religious in the same way as the characters in this play; instead, we have considered how strong religious belief renders the human struggles of the play more interesting and more complex, and how the ideas associated with religion can dictate behaviour in a similar way to a political doctrine. We are exploring the possibility that the instincts allowing fascism to take root are common, even tempting.

Similarly, Ferdinand does not become a lycanthrope in our interpretation of the original text. His loss of control must retain its human aspect because otherwise our play loses its heart. In the character of Ferdinand, we see how uncomfortably his humanity sits alongside our desire to dehumanise him as a ‘tyrant’.

Isabelle Kettle and James Bloor

WORKING WITH WEBSTER’S VERSE “Go, howl them this, and say I long to bleedIt is some mercy when men kill with speed” Iambic pentameter (a line of ten syllables with emphasis on every second syllable) is a traditional metre for English poetry, and most people are familiar with it through Shakespeare.

It’s popular because it mimics ‘normal’ spoken English, and it has an undeniable quality of forward motion that makes it perfect for performance. Cecily Berry, voice director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, characterises iambic pentameter as being all about ‘passion and movement’, and certainly it is a mobile, thrusting medium which makes it almost impossible to read whilst standing still.

To say ‘powerful verse’ is to verge on the tautological; verse is powerful by nature and the perfect medium for a play about extreme human passions. Every playwright who works with metre is still writing in their own style, and Webster’s verse, as you will hear, is quite different from Shakespeare’s. To call the verse of The Duchess of Malfi ‘iambic pentameter’ at all is not quite right; Webster by no means confines himself to ten syllables per line. Where Shakespeare is clean and strong (a normal ‘irregular line’ in Shakespeare is a line of eleven syllables, giving the impression of a skipped heart-beat), Webster is harried and human, often cramming fourteen syllables into a line, meaning that an actor must hop and scramble their way through it to give it metrical power. He still writes for five stresses, and the line still comes out strong, but the extra syllables lend a slightly mad energy to the lines, which is characteristic of the verse of The Duchess of Malfi, rather than being true of verse in general. In the play there is a recurring theme of individuals being insignificant in the face of Fortune’s inexplicable and often cruel machinations, and

the scrappy and energetic verse of the play is part of the characters’ struggle to deal with limitations bigger and less human than themselves. As the duchess works fast to help her husband escape the jealous fury of her brother, she speaks the following line: You must instantly part hence. I have fashioned it already.

Go on - count them. Try and make that line sound like ‘de-dum-de-dum-de-dumde-dum-de-dum!’ To speak a line like this is to run a vocal sprint, trying to keep up with the verse, trying to contain it within five stresses whilst it attempts to escape. Sometimes a line is just not meant to have only five stresses, and no amount of ‘scanning’ the line is going to fit that great big foot into the neat glass slipper of five meaningful stresses.

But sometimes, as above, by finding the five stresses, an actor can bring out the intention and meaning of the line as well as, in this case, expressing the Duchess’ desperate hurry to save her husband’s life. The mad and forwarddriving verse of The Duchess of Malfi is perfectly suited to a tragedy whose events spiral rapidly out of control, moving too fast for the characters to keep up.

REHEARSALS

England’s oldest University playhouse is administered and maintained by the University of Cambridge.

Chairman of the Executive Committee: Mark Billinge Theatre Manager: Flo Carr Operations Manager: Amy Powell Production Manager: Mitchell Clarke Technical Manager: Giles Fleming Office Administrator: Rhys Fraser Box Office Administrator: Hatti Simpson Box Office: 01223 300085 Free online booking: adctheatre.com | corpusplayroom.com | adcticketing.com Administration Tel: 01223 359547 The ADC Theatre is a non-smoking venue.

Patrons are reminded that in accordance with Cambridgeshire County Council regulations, the consumption of drinks in glasses is not permitted in the auditorium.

Tonight’s performance will include a 15 minute interval