Women Beware Women
Olivier, in rep until 4 July
Hair
Gielgud, booking until January 2011
Women Beware Women deserves a subtitle: spectators beware seldom revived classics. Thomas Middleton’s 1622 play is set in the duke’s court at Florence, where greed, lust, incest and the hunger for power are running rampant. Middleton is much admired, little adored. He’s one of those dramatists who sends actors, directors and literary professors into rhapsodies but who doesn’t attend to the basics of entertainment. There’s no central character in this play just a grand human theme, corruptibility. He wraps up the script in great cobwebby entanglements of interrelated storylines. In one thread we follow a character named Bianca, who starts as a demure young wife, is raped by a count, becomes his mistress and ascends from blameless gentility to a compromised position of wealth and influence. But at no point during this huge journey did I feel touched or moved by her transformation because Middleton’s grasp of character is far less certain than his knack for lyrical invention.
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