Why do we want to put on and watch this play, four hundred years after it was first written and performed? Maybe it’s because its obsessions remain our own. Flamineo and Vittoria’s dying rejection of the court, with its flattery and its malice, express our own contemporary mistrust of the fawning and viciousness of government and the press. Real tenderness and regret are in the play too, as Flamineo weeps at his mother’s deranged grief: ‘I have a strange thing in me, to th’ which/ I cannot give a name, without it be/ Compassion.’
The greatest pleasure, as always, has been working with the cast as we’ve discovered together the bizarre jokes of 1612 and the disturbing veins of fantasy and misogyny that run through the play. All life is here and, if it makes us squirm with recognition at some points, that’s no bad thing.
