The spirit of John Webster has never been better captured than in the rat-jabbing guttersnipe seen in Shakespeare in Love. This is a fact we all know to be true. And although Offshoots Theatre are performing a noble task in reinterpreting his Duchess of Malfi for the modern audience, much of his upstart spirit has been lost in a production which conforms to almost every fault found in modern productions of verse drama. Firstly, none of the actors ever looked at each other. This is not an exaggeration as my previous claim about Shakespeare in Love obviously is. Eye-contact is found so wanting that an emotional connection between characters has been completely lost in favour of finding a band that can all play the piano. Director Robin Francis Peters should have spent much more time with his actors and less time studying the films of Fellini. This is the second great flaw. The theatre should never aspire to replicate the finished arts. The only actor who commanded attention was Thomas J Bailey - his Bosala at least engaged the audience directly, arresting slightly the universality of the first flaw. Furthermore, the aesthetic of the piece was ruined by what were either technical errors or hideous directorial decisions. We hope and pray for the former. Stilted dialogue followed abstract set-piece with no intellectual or even vaguely explicable link between them. A fragmented piece of theatre that failed to deliver on almost every count, it is probably for the best that Malfi is only playing for a week. The company are clearly capable of producing something much better.
