THE CHANGELING at Southwark Playhouse

★★★½

“a slick, stylish, and refreshing take on a Renaissance play”

Tinny Italian pop music, a mini-fridge full of champagne, and, in the centre of the stage, a long wooden boardroom table surrounded by high-backed chairs. ‘The Changeling’, Middleton and Rowley’s 17th-century play, adapted and directed by Ricky Dukes, takes place entirely in this boardroom (designed by Sorcha Corcoran), with the cast in mid-century dress (excellently created by Alice Neale). The play follows Beatrice-Joanna (Colette O’Rourke), who, betrothed to a man she does not love, seeks to murder her fiancée. When Beatrice enlists the help of her servant De Flores (Jamie O’Neill), who is as obsessed with her as she is disgusted by him, both are drawn into a complex current of desire and murder.

Originally featuring a parallel plot set in a madhouse, this production bravely subsumes the comedic subplot into the tragic main plot but retains a semblance of the madhouse setting for the second act. While it scraps their storyline, the production also retains the madhouse inmates, here recast as The Patients, the house band who interrupt the tragic proceedings to croon wedding-singer style, bounce mega-balloons around the audience, and bathe the stage in disco lighting.

The production is a slick, stylish, and refreshing take on a Renaissance play. The staging is often particularly impressive, and manages to do a lot with very little, thanks in large part to Stuart Glover’s stunning and, at times, very complex lighting design. Even though the boardroom table never moves, we get everything from catacombs to fire. One particularly impressive scene sees De Flores and Alonzo (Alex Bird) descending into the castle vaults, lit cleverly by headlamps worn by the rest of the cast to create the illusion of tunnels.

The influence of Daniel Fish’s dark staging of ‘Oklahoma!’ is evident, with Jamie O’Neill, who is excellent, bringing a wounded and vulnerable desperation to De Flores’ sinister perversity, which very nearly gleans our sympathy. Refusing to cast De Flores as purely revolting and imagining him instead as someone who Beatrice might mutually desire works very well.

“stylish and unflaggingly entertaining”

It would be possible for the cast to lean even further into this fruitful dynamic, were they given a more intimate space. Instead, the interruptions of The Madhouse, though occasionally well-placed, are frequently distracting. All eleven cast members are on-stage almost constantly, navigating around the boardroom table which, while stylish looking, never feels necessary and is instead mostly a hindrance. Taking up almost all available space, it means that most scenes take place with actors entirely separated by a large piece of wood. This dampens some of the sinister sensuality and is a shame in a play that is essentially about desiring bodies.

The best parts of this play come, instead, when the production leans into sparser staging, and leverages the uncanniness of the space. One moment, where De Flores and Beatrice kneel together on the table in the centre of the chaos created, is particularly powerful.

Frequently, however, the play expends too much energy in the wrong places, and, as it reaches its tragic climax, becomes almost claustrophobic. By the end, the audience must contend not only with the table, but also with eleven cast members, fake blood, confetti, and two types of balloon.

Paradoxically, less to do would give the excellent cast more to work with. However, despite the lack of breathing room, this is a stylish and unflaggingly entertaining production. The ‘excessive’ aspects also undoubtedly most engage the audience, and Lazarus is, after all, a company designed to do exactly this.

THE CHANGELING at Southwark Playhouse

Reviewed on 10th October 2023

by Anna Studsgarth

Photography by Charles Flint

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse:

Ride | ★★★ | July 2023

How To Succeed In Business … | ★★★★★ | May 2023

Strike! | ★★★★★ | April 2023

The Tragedy Of Macbeth | ★★★★ | March 2023

Smoke | ★★ | February 2023

The Walworth Farce | ★★★ | February 2023

Hamlet | ★★★ | January 2023

Who’s Holiday! | ★★★ | December 2022

Doctor Faustus | ★★★★★ | September 2022

The Prince | ★★★ | September 2022

Tasting Notes | ★★ | July 2022

Evelyn | ★★★ | June 2022

The Changeling

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★★★

“the play as a whole is genuinely very funny”

Meeting for a secret liaison in the Westminster Hotel, Tory junior minister Rebecca Willey gleefully urges special advisor to the opposition, John Worthington, to put on his “jim-jams” in preparation for the night of adultery ahead. The champagne and oysters are already on their way by the time Willey pulls back the curtains only to discover a limp body hanging across the windowsill. Attempting to move the body out of the hotel suite and evade discovery, any plans for the night are completely derailed as Willey (Elizabeth Elvin), Worthington (Raphael Bar), and Mrs. Willey’s PA, Georgia Pigden (Felicity Duncan) are tangled in an increasingly ludicrous web of lies.

‘It’s Her Turn Now’, adapted by Michael J. Barfoot and directed by David Warwick, is a gender-swapped take on Ray Cooney’s classic farce ‘Out of Order’. All of the action takes place in one room, a hotel suite set brilliantly designed by Alex Marker. A number of doors and, of course, the central sash window, allow the characters to revolve dizzyingly across the stage as Willey stands at the centre and struggles to maintain control as her life, and later her government, falls apart around her. This makes for some great moments of physical comedy, especially in Willey and Pigden’s manipulation of the corpse, and the play as a whole is genuinely very funny.

The central change replaces Cooney’s original male MP Richard Willey with the female MP Rebecca Willey, and the swap is quite effective, thanks in large part to Elvin and Duncan’s excellent performances as the conniving Mrs. Willey and the unfortunately implicated Georgia Pigden, respectively. The new dynamics that emerge refresh the play out of the overdone, and Barfoot’s writing plays on the swap humorously. That said, it nevertheless remains very safe, and somehow still manages to feel slightly old-fashioned: every swap, for example, is carefully carried through so that each romantic pairing remains a heterosexual one. The stakes are never really altered in any significant way.

“a refreshingly funny, well-acted and well-done take on the farce”

In a similar vein, despite a few moments of knowing wink-wink reference to the apparently perennially deceitful nature of politics, attempts at political bite are never really genuine: perhaps a missed opportunity, considering the not-so-distant memories of a certain health secretary. This is farce, however, and, while Big Ben looms through the window, the play never purports to be political. Our attention must instead be focused on the microcosm of disaster playing out in this one room.

Characters are rapidly accumulated as Willey, Pigden, and Worthington embroil themselves in deceit. However, as the play progresses, the pleasure of the double-triple-quadruple bluff does dwindle, and the fast and sinuous plotting of the first act is somewhat lost as the play becomes bloated and unwieldy with its own deceptions. I especially thought that the early interactions between Nurse Foster (carer of Pigden’s aging father, played by Jules Brown) and Georgia Pigden were a missed opportunity. Had the writing been marginally less focused on deception here, this could be a genuinely heartwarming moment. Instead, by the time the play tries to use it for denouement, the interaction has somewhat lost its power and become just another half-truth.

While the ending doesn’t seem quite tied-up enough to justify the increasingly convoluted plotting, and while the production remains, on the whole, quite offense-less, this was, overall, a refreshingly funny, well-acted and well-done take on the farce, that just about manages to pull off the gender-swap without taking advantage of it for cheap jokes.

THE CHANGELING at Southwark Playhouse

★★★½

“a slick, stylish, and refreshing take on a Renaissance play”

“stylish and unflaggingly entertaining”

THE CHANGELING at Southwark Playhouse

Reviewed on 10th October 2023

by Anna Studsgarth

Photography by Charles Flint

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse:

The Changeling

The Changeling

IT’S HER TURN NOW at The Mill at Sonning

★★★

“the play as a whole is genuinely very funny”

“a refreshingly funny, well-acted and well-done take on the farce”

IT’S HER TURN NOW at The Mill at Sonning

Reviewed on 7th October 2023

by Anna Studsgarth

Photography by Andreas Lambis

Previously reviewed at this venue:

It’s Her Turn Now

It’s Her Turn Now