Duchess Of Malfi, The

A magnificent production
For most fans of Jacobean drama, John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI (1613) is the most powerful tragedy of that period not written by a man named Shakespeare. This opinion is so widely held that the play has become a standard selection in all of the drama anthologies of the period.
It is also a ferociously demanding piece of theater, full of complex speeches, strange reversals, and extravagant stage effects. For this reason, it is seldom performed. Your odds of seeing it in the U.S. are only slightly better than those of meeting the author.
Though neither the distributor (Stage On Screen) nor the dramatic company (Greenwich Theatre, London) were known to me, I bought this DVD blind because I knew that, however uneven the production might be, this was likely to be my only chance of ever seeing this great play performed.
I slowly realized that I was watching a marvelously spoken, intelligently staged, and professionally recorded production performed in front of a live...

"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle..."
One of the great plays of the English theatre, The Duchess of Malfi tells the tale of the young widowed duchess who marries again for love. But her new husband, Antonio, is from a lower class and the marriage must be kept secret from the Duchess's brothers for fear of their revenge. Although written around the same period as Shakespeare the language is much more accessible and often poetic.

This production of Webster's tragedy is boosted by the great performance of Aislin McGuckin in the title role. Her Duchess is playful when courting Antonio, strong in defiance of her brothers and beautifully controlled in the emotional latter stages of the play. The rest of the cast are very good too although I did find that sometimes they spoke very quickly (the director's decision?) and some of the words were lost. The subtitles helped here.

I've always felt that the play should naturally end after Act 4, especially since the fifth and final act is a bit over the top for...

A Boon to Teachers of Elizabethan/Jacobean Drama
One of the major issues facing those who have to teach drama of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period other than Shakespeare is the paucity of dvds as aids to teaching. Recent productions of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Changeling have been encouraging but those productions deviate considerably from the original texts and often they seem to be entirely different plays made into film. This is not to criticize such productions (they have their place)but they are not always helpful to the teacher. The Stage & Screen version of the Duchess of Malfi is much more faithful to the original and given that there is a "live" audience it is the next best things to actually seeing it on stage. That said, I do not totally agree with the downplaying of the incest theme (Ferdinand's feelings for his sister) or the choice of actor for Antonio who comes across as very lively from the outset and not the serious clerk as found in the original text. But that is carping. I do hope Stage & Screen extend...

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