This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Jacobean playwrights ran the Horror Channel of the late seventeenth century, imbued with an appetite for incest, poisoning, and corpses as hearty as any twenty-first century television drama executive in search of a post-watershed audience.

Whenever someone complains that our screens are full of sex, death and female suffering, we might refer them to John Webster’s bone-chillers, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, or Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women.

These stories tell us that women are damned if they play the game of sexual availability and just as doomed if they don’t

Long before the jargon of “female empowerment” took hold, these stories also tell us that women are damned if they play the game of sexual availability and just as doomed if they don’t. Yet unlike their Shakespearean predecessors, referenced and parodied by contemporary dramatists, referenced and parodied by contemporary dramatists, the great playhouse bodice-poisoners get infrequent attention.

Emerging talent and winner of your playwright awards Lulu Raczka sets out to redress that shortfall in Women, Beware the Devil, with Rupert Goold, the Almeida’s bankable artistic director bringing us an odd but compelling saga.

In Miriam Buether’s design, the result looks like a gorgeous Vermeer, with black and white floor tiles, leaded windows and light shifting across the stage creating optical illusions and a four-poster bed popping up and down when old-school Jacobean carnal drives need their moment.

Plotwise it is an Eton mess of a muddle — delicious in parts and clumpy overall. Lydia Leonard, who played one of Anne Lister’s lovers in the BBC’s Gentleman Jack, here plays Elizabeth, an edgy doyenne obsessed by hanging onto a country pile at risk from her brother Edward’s dissolute ways.

Her preferred method of ensuring that Agnes, a smart servant, delivers on a matchmaking plot to secure an heir is to threaten to hang her (which is what consultants today might call a decisive motivational management style).

Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea’s camp devil saunters around in the manner of Milton’s engaging Satan, lamenting the
modern lack of belief in devilment, having forewarned us that he’s in a play “which is pretty long, but don’t worry, it’s enjoyable”.

The twists and turns mount up so fast, furiously and confusingly

We start on the cusp of the civil war and end the action as the house and its traditions are on the verge of a reckoning from Cromwell’s forces after the execution of the king. The view of the “word turned upside down” and the war as a potential liberation clearly rests heavily on the Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s account (though even under the spell of witchcraft not many monarchists saw redemption in the advance of the Roundheads).

The upended hierarchies have a wry eye to the gender strife of the present. Edward is a dopey, beef-guzzling reactionary. His sister resorts to witchcraft because rationality is not getting her far. If there is a philosophical heart to the play, it is the question of whether evil is relative and “good” merely convenient to political loyalties or social demands.

The twists and turns mount up so fast, furiously and confusingly that one exasperated critic termed the production “Bridgerton on acid”. But then, who can remember the plot lines of Peter Greenaway’s Draughtsman’s Contract? If Women, Beware The Devil throws too much into the creative Magimix, Raczka does it with a zest and admiration for the Jacobean tradition which made me inclined to shelve irritation at its excesses and political default to Republicanism. The devil got it spot on — it’s a bit too long, but a romp to relish.

Another tempting offering revisiting a great literary era was The Oyster Problem which had a brief run at the Jermyn Theatre. It is the debut play by Orlando Figes, the cultural historian, here turning his hand to a fading beau monde beset by debt and doubt against the backdrop of Gustave Flaubert’s later life and impending bankruptcy.

He is aided (sort of) by his lit-mate Ivan Turgenev, who in trying to save a teetering fortune messes up the diplomacy and makes matters worse, and Zola, who embraced the nascent publicity machine of late-nineteenth century French media. The reliance on original letters gives away the play’s origins in Figes’s study of pan-European culture in The Europeans, with big ideas discussed (to the point of repetition) over oysters and dwindling stocks of champagne as the royalties run dry.

The Jermyn is a hidden jewel — the smallest producing house in the West End

Isabella van Braeckel’s set is an elegant Manet-inspired use of the Jermyn’s cosy stage. Although I liked Bob Barrett’s testy, tatty Flaubert and Norma Atallah’s magisterial George Sand injects some sense into the trio of fame-addled writers, it feels like a transient off ering as a drama. The Jermyn can do better and most often does.

Nestling between the gentlemen’s outfitters of St James’s and the back door of Fortnum’s, the Jermyn is a hidden jewel — the smallest producing house in the West End, independent in its finances and unashamedly classy in its choice of material. It is also the only theatre where the audience can’t go to the loo after the performance starts because the door is on stage.

Stella Powell Jones and David Doyle have just taken the helm as joint artistic directors after Tom Littler moved over to Richmond’s Orange Tree theatre and a new Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Jules and Jim opens in April. Truffaut devotees and anyone who has not yet sampled the Jermyn Street Theatre might like to give the heady big romance in a small space a spin.