Since putting pen to paper some 400 years ago, dramatist John Webster has hardly been the critics’ darling. His two revenge tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are about the only works critics discuss when evaluating his artistic legacy, and they’re so full of gore, skulduggery, murder, and mayhem that George Bernard Shaw dubbed him the theater’s “Tussaud laureate.” In the early part of the 20th century Rupert Brooke described Webster’s dramatic world as “full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots,” where life “seems to flow into forms and shapes with an irregular abnormal and horrible volume.” Even T.S. Eliot, who admired Elizabethan drama in general and Webster’s dramaturgical skill in particular, concluded that Webster’s plays “provide an interesting example of a very great literary and dramatic genius directed toward chaos.”
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No one can deny that Webster’s revenge tragedies seem calculated to mortify. Both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi take place in Italian courts rank with corruption, where dukes, cardinals, and courtiers concoct murderous plots against one another every few minutes, where adultery and fornication are de rigueur, and where few acts of kindness go unpunished. It’s a world seemingly without a moral center, a grotesque caricature of a Machiavellian dystopia. For critics of a bygone era, still beholden to the neoclassical edict that art must delight and instruct, Webster’s near pitiless vision must have been insupportable. For a contemporary audience, trained at the movie box office to accept widespread carnage as light entertainment, Webster’s poison-and-dagger free-for-all may seem positively quaint.
Yet for all the care Wechsler’s cast take in elucidating their text, they have a devil of a time finding Webster’s stories. The plots of these two plays are decidedly convoluted, and keeping the myriad characters’ relationships and allegiances straight requires enormous effort, even when just reading the texts. That effort is frustrated in these productions, in large part because Wechsler and his design team give their audience a nearly neutral visual field: the actors appear on a blank, almost featureless stage, and they’re costumed and lit almost interchangeably, making the critical power dynamics of Webster’s Italian court extremely difficult to discern.
Wechsler’s The White Devil is set in a particular social and economic milieu, but his The Duchess of Malfi is set nowhere. The stage is every bit as blank, and Rayna Richardson’s wholly neutral costume design–most everyone is dressed for an office cocktail party–drains all specificity from the proceedings. No world is created against which the action plays out, and the dynamics between the characters become even less defined than in The White Devil.
