Get your own Free HomepageAn expert on the Spanish Golden Age, Laurence Boswell nonetheless seems uncertain quite how to play Calderon's unwieldy story of lost lost and tarnished honour in his accomplished directing debut for the RSC.
The melodramatic elements of the play - not Calderon's best - where declarations of heart-rending anguish are common lend themselves to humour. At times Boswell can't keep his tongue out of his cheek, but at heart his production tries to recreate a society where a rigorous form of honour supersedes the urgencies of love.
Central to this interpretation is the performance of John Carlisle, all sonorous gravitas as an elderly gent dishonoured when his faithful wife is kidnapped by the lover she thought drowned. Carlisle makes credible the moral code that turns Don Juan into a pariah (well, a painter to be exact) until he has killed not only his rival but also his wife, whose impeccable behavior in captivity won't save her from guilt by association.
A subplot involving the changeable affections of the Prince of Ursino suggests a world where, once the blood is set racing, it must be split. No wonder the dapper figure of death stalks the stage like a patient vulture.
The main problem with taking this seriously comes from the lovers. Jennifer Ehle is fine indeed as the wife Serafina, voice and bodice a-tremble as she is racked between the demands of love and honour. But the estimable Douglas Henshall is at sea as the lover Alvaro.
The urbainity of Don Gallagher's Prince as he flutters between Serafina and Sophie Heyman's overemphatic Pocia, borders on parody.
The Painter of Dishonour tails off somewhat at the denouement, as the loose ends are either tied up of abruptly cut off. It is, after all, a play with more throbbing emotion than linear direction. Although his production lacks polish and some charisma in the acting, Boswell ensures that each tug on the heartstraings and the guts is keenly felt.
Over the years, I have become accustomed to trotting along to the Gate to have my eyes opened to another European masterpiece that has never before been played in this country. So why hasn't Laurence Boswell, ex-director of the Gate, managed to pull off the same trick at Stratford ? Plays require an imaginative leap, especially those written in another era, but on this occasion I fell at the first hurdle. Ramrod pride, hot-blooded jealousy and ruthless revenge is the stuff of Spanish drama and all this is on display in Calderon de la Barca's passionate drama. But it's never quite clear how much Calderon endorses a code in which it is acceptable for a father to forgive his daughter's murder with the words 'Revenge taken in honour's name cannot offend', or for a prince to ask for the hand of a woman he doesn't love over a couple of corpses. Boswell undercuts the high-minded tone with flashes of humour, but alongside moments of pure melodrama and bizarre reversals of character, they only call into question why the play is being revived at all.
As Serafina, Jennifer Ehle's bosom heaves affectingly apparently possessed by a fear of death as much as dishonour, hardly surprising given that a figure of death in a red mask pops up at all the best parties. Meanwhile, John Carlisle as her old husband and the painter of the title is forced into the wilderness because, so he says, it is dishonourable to be pitied. Boswell orchestrates with impeccable timing: doors fly open, lights flash and in a spectacular dance Serafina is wooed by her lover, but the lasting impression is that this is very silly way for life to be conducted.
The golden age of Spanish drama has still made too few inroads into the mainstream of British theatre.
Between 1990 and 1992, London's Gate Theatre did much to bring it to the forefront of the British fringe; and the director who was most involved in this minor renaissance was Laurence Boswell. Now the Royal Shakespeare Company has brought him to Stratford-upon-Avon, to stage The Painter of Dishonour - by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, one of the three master dramatists of that golden age - at The Other Place. But Boswell is a very variable director. The play is extraordinary; his production is not.
In The Painter of Dishonour, Serafina is married to an older man, Don Juan Roca, although she had previously fallen in love with the young Don Alvaro and had only married when she presumed him dead. Don Alvaro, returning, is consumed with jealousy; his pursuit of her prompts Don Juan to jealousy; and everything conspires to stop her being the model wife she desperately wants to be. The themes of sexual jealousy, adulterous love, and - above all - honour are vintage Spanish golden age stuff, of course.
Calderon makes virtuoso play, too, with the different masks of theatre. Is this tragedy ? comedy ? suspense thriller ? sex farce ? fateful melodrama ? He - a baroque artist - keeps juggling its elements right up to the end. And, by making Don Juan a painter, he adds another artful layer. Though he is a master-artist, he finds that, in painting his wife, her surpassing beauty defeats her art. Later, however, when he expresses his own jealousy in allegory, he achieves a masterpiece. Finally, he is asked to paint a subject which he finds, when he beholds it, calls not for paint but for action.
Boswell - who has co-translated the play with David Johnston - finds less ambiguity about the nature of the play, however, than my synopsis has suggested. To him it is almost all fateful melodrama. From the first, he introduces a red-masked silent Death figure who stalks the proceedings with ever more prominence, and he brings in ominous music to underline cheaply the big moments.
Several of the characters should surely be more mult-faceted. Juanete (meaning not only "Johnny" but also "Bunion") is surely the most ambiguous character - an irrepressibly loquacious servant whose running gag is a story that nobody will let him finish, whose bright chatter nonetheless darkens the mood on several occassions, and who is a reluctant participant in Don Juan's journey into revenge tragedy. Here, however, he is played by Tony Rohr as a dour and sour Irishman who is simply a mean-spirited bore. Porcia, a successful huntress who plays games with love and jealousy, is given a simple and superficial performance by Sophie Heyman. Jennifer Ehle - equipped with strikingly beautiful cheekbones and breasts - is so constrained by Serafina's high nobility that she almost never once sounds natural.
Better is Douglas Henshall as Don Alvaro. It is hard to believe in this soft-voiced and Scots-accented actor as an impetuous Spaniard, but this utterance is so sure that you hang on his every word; and he can switch from smouldering pianissomo to fortissimo explosion convincingly. Best by far, however, is John Carlyle as the painter Don Juan. Everything about him has such natural authority that in his scenes alone do we feel the high tension of Calderon's dramatic mastery. Boswell and Johnston have chosen to avoid Caleron's rhymes in their translation, but they miss also the tautness of his metre. Carlyle, however, by sheer force of spirit, supplies this otherwise missing dimension.
At the beginning of Calderon's Painter of Dishonour a gentleman-artist called Don Juan drops in on an old chum, a diplomat named Don Luis. Asked to spend the night, the visitor says what we would all say under the circumstances: that he doesn't want to be a nuisance and will stay in the local inn. The result ? Don Pedro goes nuclear, talking of the terrible slight he feels and threatening the end of their long friendship. You get the feeling that, were Don Juan to go even further, and turn down a bedtime cup of cocoa, scores of Castilian cousins and aunts would pour from the closet and stiletto him to death.
In Laurence Boswell's production at the Other Place the stakes seem high even when smallish matters of decorum and propriety are involved. Imagine how much higher they are when a wife is kidnapped and her husband is, as he thinks , cuckolded. No wonder Segovia's third cousin is ominously clunking his guitar somewhere offstage to the accompaniment of the odd thunderbolt. No wonder Boswell has the Grim Reaper stalking around the halls of his Spanish grandees dressed in a scarlet mask, as if on a weekend pass from Poe's Masque of the Red Death. You are never in much doubt that his special services will be needed by the end.
Calderon wrote the play 30 years after the death of Shakespeare, but might have done so 300 before, given its alien feel. "Oh for an hour of Herod," famously cried Anthony Hope after the premiere of Peter Pan. "Oh for an hour of Falstaff," I found myself muttering as anguished Spaniards in black hose stumbled across black flooring, beside black chairs and through black doors, earnestly debating the demands of honour. To a contemporary English mind the play is preposterous - but not without a kind of grisly fascination.
Apart from anything else, Calderon pulls plenty of surprises. Some are comically silly, but one or two not. When the beautiful Serafina hears of the drowning of the man she loves, Don Luis's son Alvaro, she agrees to wed the relatively elderly Don Juan on the rebound. It is the sort of marriage that usually turns out to be a diaster in drama, and she enters it pretty despairingly. But the nice twist is that she comes geniunely to care for her husband, and is appalled when Alvaro appears from nowhere in an accusing, demanding and decidedly undrowned mood.
Despite the verve of Boswell's cast, and the colloquialisms of the translation he has made with David Johnston, matter rapidly escalate into convoluted melodrama. Don Juan rescues Serafina from a blazing house, shoves her for safekeeping into the arms of a passing sailer, and the passing sailor turns out to be Alvaro in disguise. Don't ask me how: but the poor lady lands up with an amorous prince in the cellar of Don Luis's hunting lodge, intermittently shoving her head through a hole in the floor to say things like "Is there no escaping from love and the utter havoc it wreaks ?"
Jennifer Ehle, Douglas Henshall, Clifford Rose and others resist the temptation to send it all up, which is much to their credit: and John Carlisle goes further. His Don Juan ends up in one of those moral predictaments so loved by Spanish Golden Age dramatists. He must pot both the woman he loves and the son of his best friend if he is to recover what matters, his honour. Somehow he makes you half-believe in his bewilderment and pain. In the circumstances, that is a triumph.
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