Henry Ian Cusick in “Women Beware Women” - ‘02.1995

Review by Michael Coveney, OBSERVER

Old plays are best when they, too, seem as new.
Thomas Middleton’s violent and disturbing Jacobean masterpiece Women Beware Women (1621) has been directed and designed with insouciant relish
by Philip Prowse in Glasgow. The play’s difficult finale of multiple revenge murders by flaming gold and shooting Cupids was dodged on political
grounds in Howard Barker’s 1986 Royal Court rewrite. Prowse keeps the spirit by simply enveloping his cast of lechers and schemers in a poisoned religious fog (they are incensed by incense) while the victims meekly descend into burning pits. Florence as corrupt state and religious abattoir; helicopters
and sirens accompany the Duke’s procession; rows of rotting corpses hang from meathooks above the action. Bianca (Victoria Scarborough), newly married to Leantio (Colin Wells), a travelling businessman, is assaulted by the Duke (Gerrard McArthur) in the famous split chess scene; the widow Livia - one of the greatest roles in the repertoire, smokily played by Anne Lambton - diverts Leantio’s mother at the chessboard while the Duke stalks his prey. Here,
with no balcony, McArthur’s vile seducer and Scarborough’s flirtatious innocent simply flash forward downstage and are made private by an abstract
tricolour of green, white and red.

In the parallel plot of sexual appetite and manipulation, Livia indulges her brother Hippolito’s (Henry Ian Cusick) incestuous yearning for his own niece, Isabella (Andrea Hart), by misinforming the girl of her genealogy. Livia’s final triumph is to ratify the Duke’s rape of Bianca by claiming the “incorruptible” Leantio for herself. She lays on a fort, a glittering red jacket, and wraps her legs round him like a pair of nut-crackers.
Middleton’s wryness of tone is right up Prowse’s street: the grave debates on virtue (rejected by Barker) are made riveting by McArthur and Stephen MacDonald as the Cardinal. And he compounds the horrors even when cutting. The idiot Ward, the unlucky Isabella’s fiance, is a speechless, filthy-minded epileptic in a wheelchair.