Upper Sixth - 'The Duchess of Malfi'

Date: Wednesday 24 March 2010

Jon Dagley was kind enough to have organised a visit for his Upper Sixth English class to travel to the Greenwich Theatre to see a production of an A-level set text, 'The Duchess of Malfi'. This is his account of the evening:

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

This rarely performed play was co-produced alongside'Volpone' in the refurbished Greenwich Theatre. An excellent cast illumined the text: the Duchess was a spicy, alluring widow (certainly communicating this to an end of term teacher after a pre-theatre burrito!), in Aislin McGuckin and in Tim Treloar's Bosola we saw by turns a menacing and sleazy malcontent and murderer gaining a moral conscience but, agonisingly, too late. The wolf man Ferdinand was sinister and the horror show of dead hands and child murder sat uneasily with the passages of poetic beauty, a typical Jacobean shock tactic but not often as cleverly done as here by John Webster, the 'Tussaud Laureate'. U6 enjoyed a vibrant show. A great theatre to challenge the West End!

JPD

Just like the Windmill Theatre during the Second World War - we never close!