'The Duchess [of Malfi]' — Jodie Whittaker's assured Duchess refuses to be ruled

Read our review of The Duchess, starring Jodie Whittaker, now in performances at the Trafalgar Theatre until 20 December.

Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker was last seen on the London stage 12 years ago, in the classic, tragic role of Antigone. Moving from the Ancient Greeks to Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, she now returns in another tragedy — a modern update on The Duchess of Malfi — as the doomed, eponymous Duchess.

In adaptor and director Zinnie Harris’s production, first seen at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in 2019, Whittaker plays a confident, opinionated, and potty-mouthed Duchess, liberated by her husband’s death and determined to remain outside the clutches of her self-serving brothers the Cardinal (Paul Ready) and her twin Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne). As she tells her soon-to-be second husband Antonio (Joel Fry, who reverts to playing the loyal comedy foil seen in his early sitcom work): “I get drunk, I swear a lot, I lose things all the time.”

Whittaker gives an assured performance as the Duchess who refuses to be ruled, cackling at her brothers and dominating her worrisome, gentle husband. Whittaker’s impact is immediate: she is first seen striding on to the stage in a lipstick red 1950s style cocktail dress, and begins singing about desire into a microphone. Later, she devours an apricot on all fours, juice dripping down her chin as she takes large, hungry bites and emits appreciative moans. As she says to her brothers, “I’m a widow but I have a chance to live again — hooray!”

What Harris does well is show how feeble, childish, and brutal the men are in the Duchess’s orbit. Her husband spends more time worrying about how she can possibly love him, instead of thinking of a plan to keep them all safe from her brothers, while the Cardinal bullies his mistress Julia into sex and the petulant Ferdinand fiddles with his toy plane.

Unfortunately Byrne and Ready more often fall into parody, frequently causing the audience to burst into laughter with their lascivious and creepy comments. When Julia (musical theatre talent Elizabeth Ayodele, who briefly shines in a short song) seeks out the cardinal, he crudely asks, “I don’t suppose you’d suck my cock?” The result is cringeworthy.

The strange comedy in the first act makes the tonal shift in the second awkward. Thrown straight into the Duchess’ imprisonment by her brothers after they discover her marriage to Antonio and their two children (also twins), the scene is like something from Guantanamo Bay. Encased in Tom Piper’s stylised cube set, and sat beside a rusting bathtub that is later dripping in blood, Whittaker is subjected to horrific footage of her son and husband being repeatedly shot, while her daughter calls out for her. Accompanied by Ben Ormerod’s sickly, bright lighting and Michael John McCarthy’s jarring prison buzzer, Jamie Macdonald’s video design is truly terrifying, and with each repeat screening becomes more distorted and bathed in red.

While the production may lack the gore of previous adaptations, such as Maria Aberg’s RSC staging in 2018, which provided the front-row with protective blankets during the second half, there is still plenty of horror to be found here. The violence against women is deeply unsettling, from the ropes used for the Duchess’s strangulation to her limp legs streaming from the bathtub. Julia’s death by the Bible is inspired.

Despite the show’s modern update, the patriarchal attitudes here still feel Jacobean. Where Harris succeeds is in foregrounding the play’s sexual politics and drawing parallels with the present, from questions of ownership and coercion to pleasure and power.

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Photo credit: Jodie Whittaker. (Photos by Marc Brenner)