Synopsis De Monfort is consumed by his hatred of Rezenvelt. He is in the grip of a passion over which he seems to have little control. In 1798 Joanna Baillie, the genteel daughter of a Presbyterian Minister, published the first three of her plays on the passions. They were received with enormous enthusiasm. She was hailed by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Bryon, Kemble first performed De Monfort, then Edmund Kean. "Write me more Jane de Monforts" said the great Sarah Siddons. This is a play of daunting power and great language. It is unlike anything we have presented before. Another real Orange Tree rediscovery of an unjustly forgotten writer that must not be missed.
Oh, dear. The historical interest of Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort, a rip-roaring 1800 tragedy of inexplicable motivation and lifeless iambic pentameters, far outweighs its dramatic viability or indeed the posturing, tone-deaf production thrown at it by Imogen Bond.
One feels dismal about being so rude, as Baillie’s play was first performed at Drury Lane by John Kemble and Sarah Siddons (it was a failure) and then revived by the defining tragedian of the age, Edmund Kean, in 1821.
Baillie herself, a wealthy spinster of Scottish Presbyterian origins who lived in Hampstead until she died in 1851, was highly rated by Walter Scott and Lord Byron. But anyone who invokes Shakespearian tragedy by pumping up the melodrama – “Let me but once upon his ruin look, then close mine eyes for ever” -- is asking for trouble, or at least this review.
Justin Avoth in the title role simply doesn’t find the right tonal groove or grandeur. His moodiness is piecemeal, his gestures half-hearted. De Monfort hates a chap called Rezenvelt (Ben Nealon) but we never know why. Perhaps he kicked his sandcastle over or stole his Action Man.
When De Monfort’s sister Jane (Alice Barclay in the Siddons role) shows up, we are still denied access to her brother’s “secret troubles,” and any chance that this might become a pent-up ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, with a buried incest theme, or even a weird early version of Noel Coward’s sexual triangle Design For Living is scuppered by the play’s emotional coyness.
What must have been great “scenes” at Drury Lane – the society ball, the retreat to a religious enclave of nuns and monks, the discovery of a stricken corpse, the sad finale of two stretcher cases side by side in perennial enmity -- just seem slight and silly. Avoth dips his toe into madness and indicates some minimal affinity with Macbeth, beset by night shrieks and noises, covered in blood, his shirt undone, his gaze on fire.
You can see what Kemble and Kean might have been on about. But that’s as far as it goes. Sam Dowson’s design seems more twee than his usually inventive efforts at this address, and the full array of unsullied striped frock coats and virgin satin dresses make the cast look like waxworks. And for some of them, believe me, that’s a compliment.
I seem to have been present at a completely different play from your reviewer, who seems to get a kick out of belittling the company's efforts to find life in Baillie's very difficult, and, yes, very flawed play. The portrait of a man trying desparately to live up to society's image of a noble, heroic figure while inside he is rapidly descending into some kind of madness was movingly and cleverly charted. It does not matter why he feels as he does. People do not have to be artional by early 21st century standards - Leontes isn't in "A Winter's Tale" and there are other examples. Equally, "Cymbeline" is a very odd play but only if you approach it with the same criteria as, say, "Hamlet". So why should Baillie have to conform to other models of what a play is? She has certainly not produced an easy job for the director but I thought this production went some considerable way towards breathing life into all of the characters. In particular the assorted monks and nuns who suddenly have to take over the driving of this play were played with sensitivity and verve, sustaining the audience's interest against the odds - we have never met any of them, they are to all intents and purposes Baillie's rent-a-crowd or a kind of greek chorus at the best, but here they had individuality and they held the stage.
The music was superbly atmospheric, the setting a moodily lit pit for such desparate goings-on. - Paul Bond
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