This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

13th October 2007

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Women Beware Women is a “collaboration” between two celebrated but largely unknown playwrights. If that sounds paradoxical, it’s only appropriate – for this is, in many ways, a puzzling play.

Thomas Middleton was a controversial but highly successful Jacobean theatre writer; in the early seventeenth century, he was perhaps even more popular than Shakespeare. The English, however, would subsequently choose the man from Stratford as their chief icon of national culture – and Middleton would join that historically interesting but mostly forgotten group of figures known as “Shakespeare’s contemporaries”.

Enter, four hundred years later, Howard Barker. This maverick postmodern dramatist’s work, which he himself dubbed “the theatre of catastrophe”, has strongly influenced many theatre practitioners but is rarely seen in South Africa (hence the suggestion that he is largely unknown to local audiences). Barker has been both praised and cursed by critics for his outlandish depictions of sex and power in human relations.

Middleton’s Women Beware Women occupies precisely this terrain. It is based on the political and sexual intrigue of Renaissance Italy under Francesco de Medici, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany. In brief: Bianca (Tinarie van Wyk Loots), a young woman from Venice, elopes with Leantio (Scott Sparrow), a trader, to his home town of Florence. While he is away on business, Bianca is seduced by the wealth, authority and sheer bravado of the Duke (Mark Elderkin), and she leaves Leantio to become the Duchess. The twists and turns of various subplots lead to a bloody climax of revenge, rape and murder, right in the corridors of power.

Barker’s adaptation is faithful to the first half of Middleton’s play – prior to interval, in fact, audience members might be forgiven for thinking that they are simply watching a staging of the earlier work. When they return, however, they are left under no illusions that Barker is in charge, having appropriated the story entirely: the language is modern (and profane), rooting the interaction between characters firmly in the present day.

Director Geoffrey Hyland notes that he has long been fascinated by the Middleton-Barker version of Women Beware Women, and this production is evidence of careful deliberation. Hyland has brought together a remarkable cast of veterans and rising stars to put on a slick, invigorating, disturbing and often very funny show.

The curious way in which the play straddles the Renaissance era and our own is portrayed in the opening scenes through clever costuming. The protagonists wear clothes from an indefinable period – medieval, Baroque, even gothic – with some modern touches; the stern Hippolito (Guy de Lancey) has a Victorian suit, while the fey Guardiano (Brent Palmer) sports a leopard-skin jacket and a pair of John Lennon shades.

The dialogue in Middleton’s play is representative of its time, shifting from witty repartee to bawdy puns, but it also produces some gems. Isabella (Leila Anderson), a girl whose greedy father Fabritio (Nicholas Ellenbogen) forces her to marry a rich young ward (Luke Ellenbogen) against her will, comments on her dowry: “Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters”. The sensuous but calculating Livia (Terry Norton), whose bitterness and jealousy drives her to mastermind Bianca’s downfall, observes that “Sin tastes at first draft, like wormwood, bitter; but drunk a second time, ’tis most sweet!”

Barker’s crackerjack contribution to the script not only matches this eloquence, but explodes it – there’s lots of swearing, but every other line is consummately crafted and incisively articulate. He takes aim at the updated equivalents of the objects of Middleton’s scorn – the corrupt state, the impotent church, a population obsessed with pomp and ceremony (the glitz and glamour of celebrity culture). But, whereas there is more than a hint of misogyny in Middleton’s work, Barker affirms that all of us, men and women alike, are subject to the temptations of wealth, power and sexual instinct.

The show runs at Cape Town’s Little Theatre until the 20th October.