9 April 95
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Royal Shakespeare Company's triumphant revival of Ben Jonson's The Devil is an
Ass (1616) provides the best possible start for the new season in Stratford-upon-Avon:
a near-forgotten near masterpiece by our second dramatist performed with
zest and relish in the quasi-Elizabethan Swan, a theatre conceived for just
such occasions.
This bulging London play of capital capersgreed,
lust, potty schemes, titles for sale, corruptionis framed in a vital Satanic
plot devised to illustrate that vice on earth puts hellish iniquity in the
shade. Unperformed for 350 years, it was dusted down at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1972 and seen again in a fine 1976 Birmingham Rep
production (with Alan Rickman and Peter Vaughan), the first visiting
regional show at the new National.
Matthew Warchus's
fizzing RSC version beautifully combines Jonsonian city comedy with elements
of the less familiar medieval devil play: 'Vice' prances as a rubbery pterodactyl,
Satan booms in triplicate, and when Fitzdottrel, the gullible country squire
at the play's centre, is compelled to put on an amateur show of demonism
in the last act, his four-poster levitates, his face froths in foam and
he spits fire into the auditorium.
As an ass with
aspirations, Fitzdottrel makes a pact with the devilrepresented by a little
Pug (John Dougall), recycled inside the body of a hanged cutpurseand is
taken for a bumpy ride. He is near-cuckolded, exposed in a smart brothel,
fleeced of a gold ring and dubbed the Duke of Drowned Land. David Troughton
blunders through it all with a manic eve, a chesty voice and a limitless
capacity for truancy from sensible thought.
His foil, and nemesis,
is the mountebank Merecraft (John Nettles on great form, busy and bristling).
This 'Great Projector' overflows with money-spinning ideas which sprout
tentacular plot-lines: wholesale irrigation, toothpicks for the nation,
patented forks, and a face-paint for ladies called a 'fucus', which sounds
worse, and funnier, than an insult from Tony Slattery.
Fitzdottrel donates
his wife for chaste conversation with the 'middle wit' Wittipol in exchange
for a gold cloak in which to be seen in at the Playhouse ('I forbid all
lip work'). In two sinuous scenes of arrant seduction, Douglas Henshall
as Wittipol undoes his impromptu mistress (Joanna Roth) with cunningly poised
rhetoric and a beautiful song, literally creeping into her affection from
behind.
On the town, and
in the louche boudoir of Lady Tailbush (good to see Sheila Steafel, an expert
funny-face actress, at the RSC), Wittipol is further required to adopt the
disguise of a Spanish lady, a sort of Jacobean 'Charley's Aunt' with a vile
new fucus of his own. Bedizened in black lace and bare-assed beneath, he
suffers the lecherous Fitzdottrel's paw on his knee while exposing himself
to the silly old fool's wife on the other side of the room.
Warchus lays out
these complex scenes with clarity and brio, and his cast is uniformly charged
up. Bunny Christie's design of a glittering miniature townscape propped
up on rotting stanchions is in visual metaphor both of Henshall's outstanding
Wittipol in drag, and of the mercantile city and its theatres.
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