Ancient History

IN A DIMLY LIT corner, a courtier clutches a skull and caresses its sockets. Alas, poor Yorick? No--this time the hero is Vindice (vengeance) and skull is that of his love, Gloriana, poisoned by the wicked Duke. Cyril Tourner's The Revenger's Tragedy, while reminiscent of Hamlet, is of a distinct genre: it is not so much a tragedy as a horror play in which vengeance, severing the ties of love and kinship, sweeps its victims toward their own destruction.

Shakespeare's plays survive today not only because of the language but because of the enduring quality of the character's conflicts and motives. It is these conflicts and motives that Tourner caricatures in this play written during Shakespeare's heyday. The frivolity of court life, the superficiality of the nobility, and their preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh draw the playwright's satire. But unlike with Shakespeare's plays, a modern-day director is hard-pressed to give the vengeance play's intentionally superficial characters any meaning for a modern-day audience. The result, under the direction of Andrew Atkinson, is an exaggerated performance by pasteboard characters.

Atkinson attempts modernization, but his efforts lack consistency. Lacoste shirts for the virile sons of the Duke and frumpy Talbot's dresses for the more matronly characters, while externally updating the actors, do not make them any more believable down deep. The use of popular music at climactic scenes is likewise questionable: in the final scene, when vengeance is pounding recklessly towards fulfillment, the Talking Heads' "Psycho-Killer" erupts out of nowhere as servants sprinkle the grappling bodies with red glitter. The ploy only adds a dash of Saturday Night Fever to an already macabre event. And the updating is not uniform throughout. Sudden bursts of gunshots in the final scenes startle an audience grown used to the clash of swords. In duelling scenes, digital watches glint on the wrists of saber-holding swashbucklers.

THE BEST WAY TO adapt a play so rooted in its niche of history would be to pare down its length. Full of intrigues, setbacks, and mistaken identities, the tragedy seems almost comical, and certainly cannot sustain either the weight of seriousness or the burden of a three-hour-long performance. As written, the plot goes out of its way to lead all the characters into vengeance's grasp: secondary scenes--like the one which shows the death of the wife of Antonio, a nondescript lord--are tortuous and hinder the rest of the play.

Though Atkinson does not fit the play to the demands of a modern audience, he tailors it well to Leverett House's theater. The oak beams and wooden panelling of the stage provide the perfect backdrop for a play of this vintage. The choreography, which distributes the action over several different locations and levels, sustains the audience's attention, turning the playwright's flouting of the era's "unity of place" rule into an asset. Soliloquies from the ledges of the room's high-set windows, for example, make good use of the unusual features of the library. The audience--including a group sitting on burlap sacking on the floor--is so close that the duelling actors brush their knees occasionally, drawing them into the action with an intimacy which characterized drama during the Elizabethan and Stuart eras.

Only two characters come close to achieving that timelessness and universality which make a character endure. Ben Evett, who plays the role of Vindice with puckish bravado, and Peter Hansen, the Duke's bastard son of conniving mien, carry the play through its weaker moments. When Vindice again draws forth Gloriana's skull--this time as a weapon to poison the Duke, who unsuspecting that she is only a "shell of death" will try to steal a kiss from her in a dark corridor--he handles the scene with a deft blend of madness and humor that make the murder believable and his vengeance justifiable.

Staging a restoration tragedy--hardly a tried and true form of drama--is an ambitious and commendable task, and more polish and consistency might have helped bridge the gap between eras. Just as the director should have paid more attention to consistency of dress, he should have fixed more clearly in his mind whether to attack the play as a comedy or a tragedy. As it is, the laughter which the ribald jokes and musical accompaniment seek to draw from the audience only rankles in the play's final bloodbath.