THE CHANGELING
by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

Performed by final year Drama students
of St Martin's College, Lancaster
at The Dukes, Moor Lane, Lancaster
Wednesday 26 to Saturday 29 January 2005

Some initial thoughts: What is a Changeling?
There was no explanation of this in the programme, though the excellent Joost Daalder 1990 edition I suspect they used is clear enough about it. The audience needs to know what the play's about from the very first. The Oxford English Dictionary has five definitions to give you an idea of what the audience missed out on, for all five meanings are recognisable in this play.

But not on this occasion, I fear, because this was the worst production I have seen on stage for many, many years. And there are many reasons why I felt like this.

Setting the scene
As soon as the play opens, there is a sense of foreboding as the text makes this clear. "T'was in the temple where I first beheld her, And now again the same. What omen yet follows of that?' asks Alsemero in the play's very first two lines. So from the word go, the audience should immediately get a clear sense of foreboding, of mystery, of imminent conflict between the divine order of things ("the temple') and something as yet not quite right ("the omen').

The Changeling is set in Alicante, Southern Spain. The Mediterranean countries were, to Jacobean minds, exotic, venal hotbeds of vice, corruption, popery, violent death, scandal and Machiavellian intrigue. Shakespeare and others of the time set many of their non-historical plays abroad. There was no feeling here of any exciting, mysterious location. It may as well have been Swindon.

"A psychological tragedy'
That is how Gamini Salgado describes The Changeling in his 1965 Penguin collection, Three Jacobean Tragedies. So the psychological approach is a crucial consideration for any director. Another way of looking at this is from the paradox that those in the ‘madhouse' are sane, whilst their keepers and those on the outside gradually degenerate into their own amoral delusions and their eventual breakdown. This aspect of the play was completely ignored, too. A contemporary of Middleton and Rowley neatly sums this up:

"Surely, we're all mad people, and they Whom we think are, are not, - we mistake those; ‘Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.' (Cyril Tournuer (c1607): The Revenger's Tragedy, Act 3 scene 5 lines 79ff). The same applies in Hamlet, Twelfth Night and many other plays of this period.

This is a violent play
This cannot be understated. This kind of drama needs to unfold clearly, vividly and brutally. That's right, this play needs aggression, force and power. You cannot recite chainsaw massacre material like a multiplication table. We need to see, feel and taste the blood and gore, and leave the building with the stench of evil in our nostrils. The audience needs terrifying, not sweet-talking.

Why all-women?
My (female) colleague and I looked again at the programme, which went on to naïvely declare that "We like to think of our all-female production as a performance for today.' Why? What dramatic or interpretive reasons were behind that decision? (Finding a pretext for getting lots of female students some stage time, without any accompanying production values, quality direction or real empowerment seems a fairly cynical interpretation of gender politics, if that's what they mean - s) Jacobean theatre was a male preserve (until the Restoration) and whilst I have heard of successful Hamlets and Lears played by women, there seemed to me no clarity or vision behind this all-female production. Provoked beyond patience by the direness of it all, at one scene change, as a lad carried on a piece of furniture, I thought "Thank God, there's a man on the stage at last'. (I was amazed you could tell in the dark as he was bending over with his back to us - s-)

On a different note, there must also be due acknowledgement of the fact that this is one of the bawdiest plays of its era, even outdoing some of Shakespeare's works on that front. As well as the layers of double- and treble-meanings, irony is a key device in the drama, too. There was nothing of any of these elements present for much of the first half (though Claire Garvey did her best to get a bit of blood from the stones around her)

The theoretical approaches to production are one thing, but equally if not more important is the physical performance itself. This is, granted, quite a difficult work to stage, and is not well suited to the round, as used on this occasion. It requires a great deal more than just wandering mechanically round the four sides of the square to make such a space work convincingly.

When De Flores delivers the severed finger (with its sexually-symbolic ring still on it) to Beatrice, this must be a vital, horrific gesture. I could not see this at all where I was sat. The plot was thus further lost.

Clarity and audience engagement
It was patently clear as the first half progressed that hardly anyone on stage understood the text. This apparently includes the directors too. What hope, then, for the audience? Admittedly, seventeenth-century verse and prose are not always easy to read or to act, but final-year drama students should know their way around the syllables and meanings.

Perhaps as a result of this, the diction was so poor that, one or two characters excepted, my colleague felt as if the words were an amorphous and meaningless wash pouring over, passing us by without significance. With wooden, limited movement and direction too, it was impossible to get any real idea of what was going on, unless one knew the play.

This was all too evident looking round the audience. Even twenty minutes into the production, eyes were wandering, if not rolling, and bottoms were shifting uncomfortably in seats. All the basic advances of the plot – to say nothing of the intimate psychological gestures, twists and ironies – were completely lost on the cast, let alone the audience.

The audience needs to be confronted, engaged and almost brutalised. (Jacobean stagecraft requires a large proportion of the lines to be delivered as much to the audience as to the the other members of the cast - whose director should never have allowed them onstage so unpreparedly. - s). Slack pace, daylight between lines, fluffed cues etc were a problem in this context. Basic dramatic technique was lacking elsewhere, too. My colleague, for her part, could not contain herself when Don Alonzo de Piracquo (which is not pronounced Prack-woe) was told by his (then) fiancée Beatrice that he would have to wait three extra days for their wedding. He took the news as if he had just heard the weather forecast for Skegness (none of my old lovers ever took being put off for 3 days so unperturbedly- s). What kind of a wimp is that – or does he really love her? These are mercurial Spaniards! What was he thinking? (There wasn't so much as a grimace aside to the audience - s) We shall never know.

Cruel cuts - and awkward additions
It is extremely difficult to make cuts to such a complex text without losing some of the building-blocks of the plot and of major elements in the development of characterisation, and atmosphere. Here, unfortunately, the text had been insensitively cut. Why cut at all? – it's only some 2 ½ hours in full if played smartly. I missed, for just one example, the "belly-hour' speech from Lollio.

And if the cuts were unhelpful, the addition of extra baggage was irritating, unnecessary and time-wasting. Why were the extraneous ‘mad people' on stage at all? The text does not have them at any point enter, exit or take part in any ‘dumb show' or the like. They are only heard from offstage. Alibius and Lollio go off and specifically lead the two interns, Tony and Franciscus, onto the stage, rather than pull them off the nursery school play area.

Since ‘madness' is a core theme of the play, and one which unites the two strands of the plot throughout, it needs confronting and drawing into the overall action, and not by poor mummery. The ‘Bedlam' in Jacobean times was a cruel place (and also, incidentally, a freak show for the gentry). Given today's concerns over mental health, the playing of the ‘madhouse' scenes was superficial, superfluous and, to anyone with mental health problems, most likely insulting. I felt patronised. (I just felt embarrassed. Wearing a colander on your head - it's such a cliche. Also, what are the chances of finding an entire ward of patients who all exhibit symptoms of cerebral palsy, autism AND psychosis simultaneously? - s)

Some encouraging playing
There was, to be fair and balanced, some light amidst the general gloom. Christine Auler, ably playing De Flores, had a good stage presence, a keen understanding of the odious yet determined character she played. She came across with clear diction and some good light and shade in her delivery. My colleague was fascinated by De Flores (the best thing about this bad production was her dramatic presence – and the only lines I really understood were the ones she delivered. She stood out like a lotus in a mudpuddle - s), and this is just how it should be.

We were also impressed with the clear-voiced (and acutely witty- s) Yvonne Bentley who played Antonio, the gentleman who feigns ‘madness' in order to get into Isabella's lingerie. Claire Garvey as the flirtatious Diaphanta also showed promise and some interesting body language.

But for the rest, and in general, I have seen better theatre from secondary schools. We both found it difficult to believe that what we saw was honours degree material. St Martins can do so much better – indeed they did so at this time last year with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Charlotte Keating's My Mother Said I Never Should – see my reviews here. (And I'll never forget The Island of Dr Moreau - s)

Time to leave, unmoved and disappointed
But enough was enough. By the time the interval came round, we both had the urge to run headlong into the fresh air of the night, shout bawdry to the gods and have a good, stiff drink. And we did just that, yet with a great sorrow that such a wonderfully rich, moving and eminently actable play had been so thoughtlessly and lamentably butchered.

Copyright © 31 January 2005 Michael Nunn

(With contributions from satori)