Woman Killed with Kindness (tour)

There is a sizeable canon of Elizabethan plays which fall into the category of ‘shamefully neglected classics’. Thomas Heywood‘s A Woman Killed with Kindness belongs rather amongst the ‘rightly ignored turkeys’ tendency, where it should have remained nestled with the other 219 plays of which he claimed paternity.

You can understand why the play appeals to academics as a stepping stone between centuries of noble tragedies and the domestic drama, with lots of medieval morality thrown in. And you do get two cross-cut plots for the price of one.

In plot one, Frankford, a landed North Yorkshire gent, marries Anne, sister of Acton, a wild-eyed young knight, and immediately invites Wendoll, a young gent whom he meets for the first time, to move into the new marital home as his best friend. The rest is predictable. Having caught them in flagrante, Frankford chucks Wendoll out and sets Anne up in a house of her own, destined never to see him or their twins (who are thrown in for good measure but never before mentioned) again. Anne dies, mortified by guilt into self-starvation.

In the meantime, Acton (Anne’s brother) has entered into a wager with Mountford, another knight, over the comparative prowess of their hawks. This leads to a quarrel, and in the midst of the bagarre Mountford kills two men, and goes off to serve his imprisonment in York Castle. At this point Acton is suddenly smitten by Mountford’s sister Susan, who wants none of it. Ultimately, though she agrees to prostitute herself to Acton to pay off her brother’s debts, but Acton marries her instead.

So, yes, there’s plot, but it’s plot without structure or psychological credibility, plot without any nod towards character, these are like ciphers in a computer game.

If anyone could make this farrago work on stage, you’d put your money on Northern Broadsides, and they do work damned hard at it. Richard Standing flushes dangerously close to apoplexy in his attempt to breathe life into Frankford, and Nicola Sanderson as Susan does very good revulsion in her early dealings with Acton.

Acton, played by Paul Barnhill, and John Gully‘s Wendoll prowl and gurn like villains in a Victorian melodrama. And for the rest, alas, they can only resort to big acting, with large arm gestures and increasingly loud wails.

You can never fault the production values of Northern Broadsides, but it is perhaps permissible, once in a blue moon, to question their script selection.

– Ian Watson (reviewed at the Halifax Viaduct Theatre)