Written by John Webster

Adapted & Directed by Jennifer Dick

Review by Dominic Corr

Bard in the Botanics

Sex and violence. Love and lust. Sinners and saints. The Kibble Palace, in its Traverse style of performance, is ideal for a production that deals in reflective tragedy – its players are always confrontational, or with their backs turned, a dagger awaiting. There is little space for them to conceal themselves. It is all laid bare for the audience to witness, as Bard in the Botanics’ production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi leaves no uncertainty: only anguish and curled sneers.

Adapting the play, director Jennifer Dick takes a scalpel to this sprawling Jacobean-revenge bloodbath, distilling the cross-class torment into an intimate, high-stakes pressure cooker for just five actors. Thismorose tragedy about a wealthy, widowed Duchess who secretly marries her lower-class steward, Antonio, places autonomy right at the heart of it. Her powerful, controlling brothers – a corrupt Cardinal and her unstable twin, Ferdinand – hire the cynical spy Bosola to infiltrate her life and punish her defiance and insubordination. What begins as a secret romance rapidly spirals into a horrific web of psychological torture, betrayal, and a chaotic, bloody body.

At the centre of this domestic storm is Rebecca Robin’s Duchess, whose defiant, passionate romance with Manasa Tagica’s steward, Antonio, burns brightly against the encroaching shadows. The pair maintain the production’s pulse; that of the love between them, of the passion beneath the rot. Their short-lived domestic bliss is a fragile thing, quickly stalked by assorted pairs of boots laid out like grim votives at the altar – a visual promise of the encroaching march of doom orchestrated by her own flesh and blood. In playing human and the aethereal, Robins excels in martyrdom, and a stalwart resilience against patriarchal pressure – her ‘judgement’ of the men surrounding in the later scenes is silent, but howls with a tempest.

The architects of her ruin are a masterclass in manic malevolence. Stephen Arden’s Cardinal and Adam Donaldson’s Ferdinand operate as a deeply unsettling double act, utilising their respective religious and aristocratic power bases to choke out their sister’s autonomy. They weaponise their authority with a cold calculation that feels entirely at home in the sweat-inducing humidity of the glasshouse, turning family ties into a suffocating noose.

Yet, over a stately, unbroken hour and forty minutes, it is Claire Macallister’s Bosola who commands the emotional compass. Macallister crafts a fascinatingly complex creature; as her loyalties waver amid hints of personal coquetries, her ultimate betrayal and a catastrophic case of mistaken identity leave her scrambling for a late-stage absolution. It triggers a grand, symphonic collapse where no one is left standing beneath effective design – its ‘reveal’ this time around, looming at one end of the Kibble Palace houses a heart-arresting secret, solidified by Robin’s entirely authentic portrayal of a reality burned down; of agony on an unimaginable scale.

The Kibble Palace often houses the less family-friendly part of The BITB season. Caged inside its wrought iron, the production feels tightly enclosed and charged with menace. The audience, ensnared by the brother’s jealousy, envy, and abuses of power, privilege and orchestration of tragedy, can only watch on as the reaper’s death toll racks up and the blood trickles into the gratings below. But it is Robin and Macallister who channel a humanity to the production’s layers of defiance and gradual revelation, ensuring the silver jubilee season closes on its grimmest note yet.

---