THE CHARACTERS
GIOVANNI (played by ADAM DAVIES) is an intense,
intelligent young man who has recently come down from
Bologna university. The FRIAR (PAUL SEWELL in the original
production, PAUL BRIDGES,
right, at the Chelsea
Centre Theatre) has been so impressed by his character and
promise that he has given up his university post to become
Giovanni's personal mentor. This begs the question, why?
True enough that in Ford's day, a humble Friar might hope
to better his position by attaching himself to a wealthy
family like Giovanni's; but having set the play in the
twentieth century, we have changed the social agenda.
Either the Friar entertains a notion that Giovanni is
vulnerable in some way and needs his protection, or else he
has his own reasons for following Giovanni at the expense
of his career.
It turns out that Giovanni is indeed vulnerable, but
not in any way that the Friar could have anticipated (see
I:i, 'Wert thou, my son, that miracle of wit...'). He has
lost his mother (we are not told how recently) but Florio
still lives, so the Friar is no surrogate father. Shock
Tactics finds it interesting to explore the possibility of
suppressed sexuality in the Friar's feelings for the young
man.
Originally I tended to think that the Friar was an
unblemished character whose spiritual advice gave a moral
centre to the play. I rejected the idea that he was morally
compromised by his agreement to marry off the pregnant
Annabella to Soranzo on the simple grounds that nowhere in
the text is he actually informed that she is pregnant, and
it appeared that nothing he says necessarily indicates his
knowledge of the truth. This is not the case, however. Even
though the ferocity of his hellfire sermonising in III.vi
can be explained purely by his outrage at incest, the line
''Tis thus agreed, / First, for your honour's safety, that
you marry / The Lord Soranzo' is clear enough evidence that
Florio has indeed apprised him of Annabella's predicament.
With the Priest's integrity thus impugned we are forced to
the conclusion that Ford's perspective on the morality of
his play is highly ambivalent.
Giovanni has learnt his philosophical dialectic well.
When we first meet him, he has confessed his incestuous
infatuation to the Friar, who has warned him of God's anger
and retribution; he responds defiantly by trying to
disprove the existence of God. By degrees the Friar
realises that Giovanni is a lost soul, but it is not until
nearly the end of the play that he gives up on him entirely
and tears himself away. Giovanni is deaf to the appeals of
religion, but feels drawn inexorably by fate (I:i, 'All
this I'll do to free me from the rod of vengeance, else
I'll swear my fate's my god'; I:ii, ''Tis not I know my
lust but 'tis my fate that leads me on'; V:v, 'I hold fate
clasped in my fist, and could command the course of time's
eternal motion, hadst thou been one thought more steady
than an ebbing sea...'). This intellectualism is Giovanni's
most visible characteristic; even at the moment of killing
Annabella he bids the noonday sun be dark, lest its gilt
rays 'behold a deed will turn their splendour more sooty
than the poets feign their Styx' - no-one else in this play
speaks so poetically.
Yet it does not afford him the moral and emotional centre
he clearly needs above all. He is actually an unstable
character whose depth of passion makes him extremely
dangerous. His madness is revealed by degrees: for
instance, in V.iii where he accuses the Friar of forging
the letter; still more clearly, in V:vi, ''Tis a
heart...look well upon't; d'ee know't?' When Annabella is
married, but still allows him to carry on their
relationship, it is easy to understand the strain that
undermines his sanity; yet even earlier, during what should
have been a scene of unbounded joy - their first act of
love - Giovanni is tortured by the thought that his bliss
cannot last for ever.
Every character in the play except the Friar underestimates
Giovanni. Florio, his father, suspects he may be of unsound
mind, but does not see beyond his bookishness (I.iii,
'...he is so devoted to his book, / As I must tell you
true, I doubt his health'). Even Annabella misunderstands
her brother's murderous intentions at the last, critical
moment. Giovanni must in the end reveal a ferocity and
violence which take everybody by surprise. The key to this
is Vasques, Soranzo's bodyguard, who
makes the mistake of thinking that Giovanni can
simply be lured into a trap as easily as Grimaldi. Vasques
takes the latter on in I.ii; Grimaldi is a professional
soldier who 'did good service in the wars against the
Milanese', yet Vasques treats him with contempt and defeats
him easily one-on-one. In contrast, at the end of the play,
Vasques firstly fails to prevent the death of Soranzo - an
extraordinary lapse! He merely watches, mesmerised, like
everyone else on stage, by Giovanni's explosive violence;
as Annabella's heart is thrust into Soranzo's face
(
right), all seem momentarily unaware of the now
naked blade inches away from Soranzo's ribs. Secondly, when
he does spring into action, too late, he is unable to take
out Giovanni on his own and must call on the hired men
waiting outside. In Ford's text there seems so little
reason for Vasques' failure at this crucial moment
(Giovanni: 'Come, I am armed to meet thee...') that we have
taken advantage of the modern setting and have Giovanni
take a gun from the dying Soranzo and actually shoot
Vasques, who is armed as usual only with a knife.
FLORIO (played by BRUCE IRVING), father of Giovanni
and Annabella, is sometimes given bad press as
feeble-minded and vacillating, particularly from the
seemingly cavalier way he deals with Bergetto's suit. But
we have learnt that he is a rather shrewd operator whose
overriding concern is to preserve the appearance of
propriety.
When he learns from Richardetto that Annabella is pregnant,
his shows great self-restraint, being anxious not to let
Richardetto have the satisfaction of seeing him at a
disadvantage; he waits until the the Friar arrives, then
vents his frustration at the departing doctor with the
barbed comment 'Welcome, religious friar; you are one /
That still bring blessing to the place you come to.' He
could be thought a little naive not to entertain any
suspicions about his children's affections, but such
notions lie so far outside his understanding that when he
is finally apprised of the truth, the shock kills him.
In any case, he deals with Donado and Bergetto with
considerable diplomacy. The line that causes problems is
when Donado has formally applied for Annabella's hand on
his nephew's behalf, and Florio says to her (II.vi)
'Where's the ring, / That which your mother in her will
bequeathed, / And charged you on her blessing not to give't
/ To any but your husband? Send back that.' Apparently his
mental fog is so dense that he can instruct his daughter to
accept Bergetto's suit, despite the fact that he actually
intends Soranzo to be her husband.
The explanation is simple; it goes beyond the dramatic
irony of the reply Annabella is forced to make about the
ring having been taken by Giovanni, and shows how much
faith Florio has in Annabella's common sense and courage.
When Donado has left he tells Giovanni with some
satisfaction,'Well, your sister hath shook the fool off'.
He clearly expected her to do just that. His ploy of
putting Annabella on the spot was meant to elicit the
tactful but firm refusal that she in fact gave; and indeed
from the start we can see that Florio had no intention that
Bergetto would be a suitable candidate. In I.iii when
Donado is applying for permission for Bergetto to be
considered as a husband, and listing all the financial
benefits that would accrue from such a match, Florio shows
much tact (Donado is after all a friend, if not a
particularly close one) and a careful reading of his lines
shows that he is warning Donado not to get his hopes up: 'I
understand you; but would have you know / I will not force
my daughter 'gainst her will.... / My care is how to match
her to her liking: / I would not have her marry wealth, but
love, / And if she like your nephew, let him have her. /
Here's all that I can say.'
Ultimately it is Florio's concern to preserve the outward
appearance of virtue rather than the reality of it which
mars his character. This is seen most clearly when he gains
the Friar's connivance in foisting the pregnant Annabella
on the unsuspecting Soranzo, a dishonest and cowardly act
that is bound to have unpredictable and unhappy
consequences.
ANNABELLA (played by CATHERINE BROOKS) is a
strong-willed girl who is only prevailed upon to agree to a
marriage by the ineluctable fact of her pregnancy. Once
married to Soranzo she continues her intimate relationship
with Giovanni, at least until scene IV.iii when it is
discovered that she is pregnant and is locked away; in this
high-octane scene of confrontation she refuses to be
intimidated by Soranzo's rage and bluster, and even when he
threatens to kill her she is happy to accept death rather
than betray her love. She is thus recognisably of the same
stock as her fiery brother, but lacks his obsessive
determination; she first allows her scruples to be overcome
in agreeing to a marriage (however inevitable this seems),
then finally capitulates to her feelings of guilt and
writes the fateful 'Dear Giovanni' letter.
In the final scene between them, V.v, we see her more as a
sister than a lover; she keeps her head and tries to warn
Giovanni of the impending danger, but as he urgently
presses her on her thoughts about the eternal verities - a
matter of overwhelming importance to him, as he desperately
needs reassurance that if they cannot be together in this
world, they may be reunited in the next - she is quite
unable to offer more than platitudes, and, as noted above,
she fatally misunderstands her brother's final intentions.
To return to Giovanni for a moment, we asked ourselves what
his motives were at the start of this scene. Obviously he
has brought a knife with him; equally clearly his first act
in the scene is to try to resume the sexual relationship
with Annabella. As soon as she balks at physical intimacy,
he knows that the letter was no fake (this was always a
desperate self-delusion anyway - ''Tis her hand, I
know't'), and his course is fixed. Presumably if she had
been compliant, they would have made love, then considered
running away together; but since she has proven treacherous
to her 'past vows and oaths', he has no alternative but to
honour the solemn pact they made in I.ii, 'Love me or kill
me, brother.' But he ensures she is praying at the moment
when he kills her, so that her soul may go straight to
heaven ('Go thou, white in thy soul, / To fill a throne of
innocence and sanctity in heaven'), - cf. Hamlet's reason
for not killing the praying Claudius when he has the chance
- thus turning on its head Vasques' plan to catch them in
sin and despatch them to hell.
Giovanni and Annabella are in the conventional view the
most deeply sinful characters in the play. Yet they remain
true to themselves and are, in a sense, innocent; everyone
else in Parma, including, as we have seen, their father,
and even the Friar, makes morality subservient to
expediency.
SORANZO (played by TOM WALTON) is a
hypocrite (II.ii, 'The vows I made, if you remember well, /
Were wicked and unlawful: 'twere more sin / To keep them
than to break them') and a coward (III.ix, Grimaldi
speaking before the Cardinal, 'But Florio, you can tell,
with how much scorn / Soranzo, backed with his
confederates, / Hath often wronged me; I, to be revenged, /
(For that I could not win him else to fight) / Had thought
by way of ambush to have killed him...'). Nevertheless he
is not an entirely unappealing character. We are rather
glad to see the coarse, self-important Grimaldi humiliated
in I.ii; and Soranzo also has to suffer the hatred of
Hippolita and Richardetto, both of whom plot his death.
However weak a character he is (and Vasques certainly
thinks so), it is not his fault that he ends up married to
a wife made pregnant by another man, and we can all
sympathise with his fury and frustration in IV.iii. The
experience seems to help him grow in maturity; it is not
till the end of the play that he starts to assert himself
more effectively against the bullying Vasques.
VASQUES (played by MICHAEL PEGLER)
is seen by audiences as an evil, manipulative monster; this
is the impression he makes on them by his ruthless
treatment of Hippolita and Putana. At the end of the play,
he claims to reveal his true motive: loyalty to Soranzo's
father, which he dutifully transferred to the son. As
mentioned above, however, it is notable that he fails to
protect Soranzo at the crucial moment; yet he still claims,
before leaving the stage for the last time, 'This conquest
is mine; and I rejoice that a Spaniard outwent an Italian
in revenge'. One has to ask, what conquest? Vasques' is a
hollow victory; the only true winner is Giovanni, though of
course he pays for it with his life. Vasques seems to feel
more satisfaction in having killed Giovanni than regret at
having failed to save Soranzo; his last words therefore
prove his total failure to grasp the significance of what
has occurred.
DONADO (played by OLIVER WILKINSON)
is solely concerned to marry off his feckless nephew,
Bergetto, and is prepared to tell blatant untruths to
achieve this (II.vi, 'I dare swear / He loves you in his
soul: would you could hear / Sometimes what I see daily,
sighs and tears, / As if his breast were prison to his
heart.').To Bergetto he is merely contemptuous at all
times, though when Bergetto is mistakenly murdered, he is
genuinely grieved. Nevertheless, it is the Cardinal's abuse
of power in protecting the murderer which calls forth his
strongest indignation (III.ix).
BERGETTO (played by ELLIOT TAYLOR)
[left in picture] and
POGGIO (played by
JUSTIN AUDIBERT) are the comic double-act and in this
production are modelled partly on Jim Carrey and Jeff
Daniels in
Dumb and Dumber. In the original text
Poggio is Bergetto's servant. We were a bit stumped by this
as it appeared difficult in a modern-day context for this
servant to be so close to his master in age and tastes (no
parallel, for example, in
Arthur). Our rationale
goes as follows: in their first scene, I.ii, Bergetto
brags, of his marital prospects, that as an elder brother
he can be no coxcomb (or 'loser' in our slightly updated
version of the text), and Poggio teases him with the
reminder that he has no prospect of inheriting any more
land or money.
We surmise from this that Bergetto's father has died and
that he has been spending his way through his inheritance;
this explains why Donado, his uncle, has taken on the
responsibility of marrying him off. In our version, Poggio
is Bergetto's friend, and when Bergetto came into his
fortune, he employed Poggio as a valet and chauffeur to
help him spend his money. Nevertheless, however much of a
fool Bergetto makes of himself, Poggio always keeps a
little aloof, and mostly seems to enjoy Bergetto's
self-humiliations and even to encourage them. Bergetto is a
joyous creation of Ford, abounding in a stupid
self-confidence and obsessed with sex without having the
first idea what it involves. The audience loves him, and it
is a daring coup of Ford to have him killed off in the
middle of the play.
PUTANA (played in drag by KOFI KYEI
in the original production; KATHRYN MARTIN in the revival)
is Annabella's tutoress and guardian, and along with
Annabella herself, Giovanni and the Friar, forms a quartet
of characters that Ford has lifted straight out of
Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet. But this nurse is
considerably more coarse even than her Shakespearian model,
having more in common possibly with the Nurse in Euripides'
Hippolytus, who is equally prepared to condone
incest: speaking to Phaedra, who is in love with her
stepson, she says, 'Be bold, and love; this is god's
will...It's not fine sentiments you need; you must have
your man.' Cf. Putana (II.i), 'Why, now I commend thee,
charge; fear nothing, sweetheart; what though he be your
brother? Your brother's a man, I hope, and I say still, if
a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody,
father or brother, all is one'. She also has in common with
the Euripidean nurse that it is through her that her
mistress is finally betrayed, but Putana pays a more
gruesome penalty for her foolishness. Despite her name, she
is not of course the eponymous whore!
Richardetto and Hippolita are the principal
characters in the sub-plot.
HIPPOLITA
(played by SHELLEY MASKELL) is the hot-blooded femme fatale
who had an affaire with Soranzo. She has been far from
discreet in the conduct of her love-life: Putana, after
all, knows all about it (she calls her 'the lusty widow',
I.ii) and her husband Richardetto had his suspicions. When
word came that his brother had died, Hippolita encouraged
him (at Soranzo's urgent behest) to travel to Livorno and
fetch his now orphaned niece Philotis, simply as a way of
gaining more time for the adultery to continue. Her
response when rejected by her lover is to plot his death,
and she is prepared to make the same meaningless promises
to Vasques to secure his aid that Soranzo had once made to
her.
The masked dance that she arranges at the wedding reception
as a way of infiltrating the celebrations is a graceful
ballet of white-robed maidens in the original text,
performed as a wedding gift to Annabella; SHOCK TACTICS of
course turns this on its head, making it into a sleazy
kissogram routine intended to embarrass Soranzo; his
response 'Thanks, lovely virgins' gets a big laugh as a
result.
RICHARDETTO (played by MARK RIVERS)
as the wronged party here might have seemed a relatively
innocent character, but his elaborate and destructive
schemes cast him in a most unsavoury light. It seemed right
to us to relocate him from a house to a hotel room, as a
more appropriate base for his undercover operations. His
counter-plots and disguise have earned him a ringside seat
for his wife's humiliation and destruction; whereas he
successfully managed to bite his tongue when it transpired
that his bungled efforts had resulted in the murder of the
fool Bergetto, on this occasion (IV.i) the powerful mixture
of shame, frustration and indignation come bursting out of
him so forcefully - 'Heaven, thou art righteous!' - that he
almost gives the game away.
He remains incognito in order to witness the downfall of
Soranzo, which means that his final self-revelation,
seconds before the play ends, and as a coda to the
preceding bloodbath, seems grotesquely bathetic and
inappropriate. He uses and abuses everyone he comes into
contact with, though he is careful to shield his niece from
the worst of his skulduggery, and ultimately sends her off
to a convent for her own protection. It is very obliging of
Philotis to agree to a saintly calling, having played the
role of a good-time girl only a couple of scenes before
with Bergetto!
Richardetto acts throughout as a kind of chorus to the
play, partly narrating events, partly interpreting them.
But even though he is largely a spectator rather than a
participant, it is unlikely that Ford intended the audience
to view the story through his eyes. There is a distance
between the events and his interpretation of them, a gap in
which we may observe the operation of irony.
The love between
PHILOTIS (played by
ANNA LUSSER) and Bergetto acts both as a comic counterpart
and as an ethical complement to that of Annabella and
Giovanni. The latter are inspired by beauty and idealism;
they must each overcome the opposition of their society and
their own consciences before their love can even be
expressed in words; their forbidden intimacy only deepens
and strengthens their love. Bergetto, on the other hand,
must only overcome the hostility of his uncle, and even
this is merely imagined (Donado is assured by Florio that
Philotis is a virtuous girl); he responds not to beauty,
but to the tender touch of a plain girl who merely washed
his face and hands. Giovanni's moment of hesitation before
his first act of love has dignity and simplicity ('What
must we do now?' - I.ii), but he proves to be a great
success in bed; Bergetto's corresponding moment - 'Poggio,
I have a monstrous swelling about my stomach, whatsoever
the matter be' (III.v) - illustrates that his understanding
of sexuality is practically pre-infantile, and his love for
Philotis - appropriately, pathetically - is never
consummated.
Philotis 'fashions her heart' to love Bergetto as an act of
duty, to oblige her uncle. The affection between them is
nonetheless real enough, and its outcome, like that of
Annabella and Giovanni, is death: symbolic in the case of
Philotis, being sent off to a convent, though of course
Bergetto is really killed - in a farcical accident. So even
the comic characters are fitted into the ethical pattern
whereby desire inevitably leads to death (see Denis Gauer,
Themes).
GRIMALDI (played by CHRIS WOOD in
the original production, DAN BROWN,
right, in the
revival) is a distingushed soldier and a close associate of
the Cardinal. Nevertheless, he is clearly not a favoured
suitor; he lacks charm and looks, and for all his military
bravado, is no match for the ageing Vasques. He is easily
manipulated by Richardetto and readily agrees to
assassinate Soranzo, but he cannot even get this right. He
ends up relying on the patronage of the papal nuncio to get
him off a charge of murder.
THE CARDINAL (played by TIM HUDSON)
represents the temporal power of the church (the Friar is
its spiritual voice), and as such he appears essentially
corrupt. What possible reason can he have for taking
Grimaldi into the Pope's protection, other than the fact
that he is of aristocratic blood? And even so, Grimaldi
intended to kill Soranzo, who is also a noble. Shock
Tactics, typically, sees repressed sexuality at work again!
In the last act, the Cardinal appears to be once again on
good terms with the very citizens he had treated so harshly
in Act III. He even spares some words of ghostly comfort
and concern for the dying Giovanni. But in the end he shows
himself a mere coward ('Raise up the city, we shall be
murdered all...') and brigand ('And all the gold and
jewels, or whatsoever, / Confiscate by the canons of the
church, / We seize upon to the Pope's proper use'). His
last words end the play and give it its title, and in
context they reveal the essential shallowness and cynicism
that contrast not only him, but the whole of his society,
with the purity and innocence of the incestuous lovers.
THE STORY with PRODUCTION PHOTOS
THE THEMES
FORD'S WORLD
THE COMPANY
