The cast on set of The White Deviljohannes hjorth

The White Devil sits as one of Jacobean theatre’s less well-known pieces. Written by John Webster in 1612, it is often eclipsed by its flashier cousin, The Duchess of Malfi, other bombastic revenge tragedies like ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (last staged at the ADC in Lent 2015), or Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which is so gruesome that audience members regularly faint during performances. It certainly does not lack the drama of its better-known alternatives, centred on the violent consequences of a dangerous affair between the Duke Brachiano (Tom Chamberlain) and Vittoria Corombona (Beth Dubow), and the perils of all-encompassing ambition. They are circled by a litany of malcontents and murders, such as Vittoria’s brother, the ultra-ambitious Flamineo (Ryan Monk), the corrupt Cardinal Monticelso (Joe Spence), the vengeful Francisco (Adam Mirsky), and the reviled Lodovico (Seth Kruger). The body count is high, and the cast is bumped off in all manner of imaginative ways. Its latest appearance on the ADC stage as week four’s main show sees it reset from Renaissance Italy to contemporary Russia, emphasising the play’s exploration of politics, religion, morality, and murder.

This production seems timely. The shadowy world of post-Soviet Union Russia sees the truth sometimes become stranger than fiction. Only a few weeks ago an inquest into the almost unbelievable assassination of Alexander Litvinenko saw the finger of blame pointed in the direction of not only the Kremlin but Vladimir Putin himself. The former Federal Security Service agent’s murder, poisoned with polonium-210, ingested in a cup of tea in the Piccadilly branch of Itsu, sounds too outlandish for even the most cliché spy film. Other high-profile murders include the opposition journalists Paul Klebnikov in 2004 and Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, and opposition politicians Sergei Yushenkov in 2003 and Boris Nemtsov in 2015. I spoke to the Director, Frank Martin, about how Putin’s Russia, especially the violent years of his early premiership a decade ago, provide a new lens to view a revenge tragedy.

The parallel, he says, is “startlingly appropriate”, as it emphasises the play’s central theme of corruption: in the state, in the church, and especially in the interrelationship between the two. “Nowhere else in the modern world”, Martin says, “has a political culture so murderous”, especially somewhere with such significance on the international stage. I’m usually a sceptic of transferring the setting of plays — most of the time ‘concept productions’ underwhelm and don’t make sense — but this time I’m convinced. Nowhere else in the world could accurately parallel the openly murderous political sphere of sixteenth-century Italy than Putin’s Russia.

In the original text, state corruption is one and the same as that of the church. Cardinal Monticelso embodies one of the most ubiquitous of Jacobean theatrical tropes: the corrupt Catholic ‘charity’. Vittoria proclaims at one point: “thou art seldom found in scarlet”. He is the mouthpiece of some of the most violent misogyny of the play, as master of a Kangaroo Court, which accuses a female character of, amongst other things, being “worse than dead bodies”. The Russian Orthodox Church replaces the early modern Roman Catholic Church, in an interesting thematic parallel that is seeped in conservatism as well as corruption. Martin talks about a strange tale involving the Patriarch Kirill (a position similar to the Pope), who was photographed wearing a £1,900 gold Breguet watch, which was then unsuccessfully photoshopped out, the reflection revealing the truth of the image. As a church heavily involved with Putin’s regime, and especially in Russia’s socially conservative ‘morality laws’, such as those which ban ‘homosexual propaganda’, the religion depicted in this production of The White Devil will be just as powerful and destructive as its original Renaissance incarnation.

I spoke to Beth Dubow who, in playing the complex and ambitious Vittoria, grapples with the construction of femininity and feminine power in a world defined by violent patriarchal misogyny. In some productions, Vittoria is a victim of her circumstance, bartered for power by her brother, Flamineo, who uses his sister for her sexual value. In this production, Vittoria cuts a more complicated figure. Dubow describes Vittoria as a ‘Desdemona gone wrong’, one of the very few obliquely sexual female characters who comes out of drama in the seventeenth century – even Lady Macbeth, arguably the most iconic female character of them all, is not driven by sexuality as much as Vittoria. She spoke of how Vittoria is “wrestling for agency in a society which is based around the subjection and objectification of women, which defines women by their sexual value, but also shames and criminalises the practice of female sexuality”. Femininity is her greatest weapon and her greatest weakness, weaponised for her own advancement, but also the cause of her downfall. Vittoria, Dubow suggests, embodies an interesting debate in modern feminism about the nature of women’s sexuality, and how it can be wielded. The audience should expect to see a nuanced and dramatic portrayal of female sexuality, with the threat and fear that it causes driving much of the action of the play.

Staging a revenge tragedy always has its difficulties. The eventual bloodbath can be comedic — in a bad way. The finale of The White Devil is not like that of King Lear or ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, when the ensuing brutality is sprayed out across the stage at the same time, but instead spread entirely across the performance (expect your first murder early on). When T.S. Eliot said that Webster saw “the skull beneath the skin”, he was referencing the nihilistic worldview that the play depicts — the good suffer and the wicked prosper, and there isn’t much hope for the future. This nihilism makes the play darkly entertaining — from the rehearsal I saw, the murder and intrigue will be packaged with a darkly comedic edge.

Strong performances and an interesting reinterpretation means that The White Devil is set to be both a thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable production that is definitely worth watching.

White Devil will be on at the ADC at 7:45pm from Tuesday 9th - Saturday 13th February 2015.