Genevieve
	Waking	Sleeping	Sign	Repose	Wish
	The gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam...

Leave a Comment

Did I really sit thru this?
2002-02-28 - 5:02 p.m.

Well, since poor Theo is busier than than the Easter Bunny 40 days after Fat Tuesday, and Mel is just disappointed, I guess it is up to me to post the glowing review of the Duchess of Malfi. Uh, right. Well, it was interesting all right, I will give it that. It wasn't nearly as depressing as the Trojan Women, but then again the lewdness of Jacobean drama can't touch the Greek Tragedies.

Okay, first of all, Kelly McGillis is wonderful, but she's also 44 right now, and has two kids. The play specifically starts off talking about a young widow. Okay, I guess 44 is young to be a widow, plenty of time to remarry and move on with new life. But this is the 17th century. Also, the scene she does topless, well, two children, I envy the rest of her figure, but I'll keep my breasts thank you very much.

The basic plot is that Duchess has two brothers, one's a cardinal (think Rowan Atkinson as Black Adder) and one's a Duke (think Aveloc meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert). Duchess is widowed, oh wait, already covered that. Brothers do not want her to remarry, no children by first marriage we can only assume and I guess they hope to produce heirs to pass lands onto. So there is this one interesting bit of dialog where she is trying to convince her brothers to let her marry again saying that a diamond passed down in family history is made more valuabe. One brother points out that a whore would be worth her weight in gold then. That kinda ended that arguement. So, Duchess, having fallen in love with her Steward (and being one of those agressive women that the rest in the play were, yeah, uh huh) she persues him, catches him and they are married in secret.

Okay, still with me?

Married in secret and somehow keeps her three pregnancies and the resulting children secrets from the court. Right... Oh, forgot to mention, there is one guy (played by Andrew Long, our favorite exhibitionist Oberon from Midsummer's Night Dream) who the Duke hires/bribes to be in his sister's household to keep an eye on her and report back to him. He eventually finds out about the secret marriage and secret children and tells mean old Duke guy. Mean old Duke brother comes into Duchess bed chamber, they have a fight, she bares her breasts to him (to prove her humanity? tengo nada...) and then he runs away. Must have had the effect that seeing your parents doing it would. Eww. Duke guy never found out who the secret husband was, so hunts around for info, in the meantime, she accuses her husband/steward of stealing and exiles him, telling him she will follow him to exile shortly. While in exile they are hunted down and husband takes eldest child while she keeps lady in waiting and two youngest and the stuff, making her slower. She's caught and imprisoned in her own palace.
Thank god for Intermission.

At this point we have seen very interesting costume decisions, the person must have been flamboyantly gay or just hit one too many times in the head, er, maybe both. It was almost 16th Cent., almost, with some 17th cent tossed in and then random, I got no idea where they hell they came up with that idea clothes. The old man in the leather skull cap with the big bubble blowing hoop as a courtier was quite entertaining though.

Okay, so second half. Uh, so now things start to get really wierd. I swear, I do not make this shit up. We come upon the Duchess locked up in her room with her LiW and two kids. Her Duke Brother is trying to make her go crazy (the outcome I was uncertain of, what did he expect to gain by making her mad?) and has statues of her husband and son as if they were corpses made up to make her think they were dead, and then brings in madmen to, uh, almost ravage her, but she feels at home with the crazies, and then some stooped old crazy rastafarian comes in and first says he is the tomb maker, to then say he is the bell toller to then say he is the executioner. Sure, right. She figures, hell, why not, kneels and they strangle her. So, early in second half, Duchess is dead. And the play goes on? right... So the rastafarian takes off his disguise and he's the same spy her brother paid to be in her household who sold her down the river. Faboo. Then Duke brother comes in and starts weeping over dead sister saying what have you done? to wit pawn spy guy gets a bit incensed, only what you bid, master! So Duke brother goes crazy and moves in with evil cardinal brother, who has really delicious red velvet robes, a gooby hat, but nice boots. Kyna and I envy all the fine footwear in the play. So somehow this other minor character gets killed by the Cardinal, poisons bible cover and makes her kiss it to swear on it. Kinda sick. She had really cool purple shoes, funky orange and purple dress. Nice updated Princess Leia hairdo. I couldn't figure out if she was married to duke brother and sleeping with cardinal brother, or the other way around, but got proposistioned to be mistress at least two other times. I guess she was just the resident Ho with an ultimately good heart or something. She had really nice purple shoes.

So, where was I?
Ah, right, Duchess, dead. Duchess's LiW and two youngest kids, dead. Duchess husband and oldest son, believed dead, but not. Julia the Ho, dead. Duke, crazy. Courtiers, foppish. okay, onward.

It all comes down to a few sightings of the Duchess's ghost, Duchess's husband going to make plea for his life from Cardinal, Cardinal getting caught saying he was gonna kill spy guy, spy guy killing husband by mistake, thinking Cardinal, actually killing Cardinal when he comes in to see what is the matter, and offing crazy Duke guy with the Duke's own sword, and ends up shuffling off his own mortal coil when the Duke catches him with a fatal blow. Yeah, so four more dead guys. Meanwhile, the Courtiers, having previously been told to ignore screams of crazy Duke, ignore it all until curiousity gets the better of them and they happen upon the scene. One says in a overly cheery high pitched voice: "Oh Sad Disaster!" You think you might be understating it a bit? Then husband's friend comes in with oldest child who crys around dear old dead dad, and then inherits the lands and priviledge of the Duke, Duchess and Cardinal, since no other heirs. To celebrate, he hops on a palio pony and rides off into the night. Right.

So, depite the fact that everyone dies, I found it quite entertaining, amusing even. I don't think it was meant to be this funny.

So, funny quotes from the play:

"A Count? To me a Count is nothing but a sugar cane." IE: unsubstantive... get it... she's already a duchess, why marry a count. Not quite sure why brother was trying to set her up if he was against her marrying again. whatever.

"A strong thighed bargeman" when talking about the folks she might be "entertaining." Hello...

"Sad Disaster" 'nuff said.

So, if you already have tickets, take some friends with an equally sick sense of humor and go. It's only wasted time. If you were thinking about getting tickets, uh, I'd skip this one. Really, get tickets to the summer Free for All of Two Gentlemen of Verona.

So, to sum up, really funny tragedy. Nice footwear throughout the play. Hideous costuming. so-so acting. swing and a miss plot. Eh, well, it wasn't another night in front of the TV.

On another note, Alan thinks he saw Sir Derek Jacobi at the end of the row behind us. It certainly looked exactly like him, and had some of his mannerisms from the movies he's made. Who is Derek Jacobi, you ask? Well, he was the narrator in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, he was Claudius in Kenny's over the top Hamlet. Others may remember him from the Brother Cadfael series. He was most recently the nice white haired senator in Gladiator. Very cool. We didn't goob the man at all, barely gawked. Kinda wish we had, but no big.

So, that's it. I am slowly reconstructing my damn crashing address book in Netscape, pain in the ass piece of shit... grr... snarl...

<< - >>

---

www.flickr.com