Review: VENICE PRESERVED, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Venice is a failing state, its senators corrupt, its institutions moribund, its very fabric dissolving into the lagoon as the rain beats down. With echoes of Shakespeare's opening scenes in Julius Caesar, conspirators meet to plot the overthrow of a regime too complacent and too vicious to deserve any other fate. But when you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die.

Thomas Otway was 30 years old when he wrote this play in 1682 and it feels like a young man's work, all testosterone-fuelled anger, grand gestures and impotent rage. In the excellent programme, director Prasanna Puwanarajah talks about the influence of Cyberpunk aesthetic on the production, but I found echoes of Liverpool in the early 80s, the howl of The Clash, the nascent transgression of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Militant Tendency's radical political solutions to salve the sense of abandoned isolation. (That Jodie McNee plays Belvidera in her native Liverpudlian voice may have had something to do with it).

As our present day polity creaks lurching from one crisis to the next, the 300 years distance means nothing, as Otway's urgency strikes home in line after line - this is "Project Fear" substantiated by a playwright centuries in his grave.

Jaffier (a nervous, confused Michael Grady-Hall) is drawn into the plot by his friend, mercenary Pierre (a chest-puffing Stephen Fewell), both men with personal and political grudges against members of the Senate. They circle each other throughout the narrative, Jaffier pulled between loyalty to his friend and loyalty to his wife, Pierre alternately condemning and forgiving Jaffier as he sees his dilemma.

Amongst the alpha-males, Steve Nicolson delivers a chilling Renault, with the look of a man who has wandered in from the set of the original Mad Max - the warning that "You're in too deep son" made flesh and blood.

There's a tremendous comic turn from John Hodgkinson as the fetishy senator, Antonio, whose addiction to BDSM games continually infuriates his courtesan lover, Aquilina (Natalie Dew, dripping disdain). She really does hate him and really does want to hurt him - but that, of course, merely pleases him more - and, as courtesans do, she does take his money. Hodgkinson channels a few politicians we could name with his pomposity and sense of entitlement and shamelessly breaks the fourth wall with a marvellous ad lib or two.

This was an early play for a lead actress (women only recently allowed on to the late 17th century stage) and Belvidera is a tremendous role, given full weight by an increasingly desperate McNee. Though buffeted by the pride of the men in her life and treated like a pawn in their high stakes tooled-up chess match, Belvidera, wife of a conspirator, daughter of a senator, is the moral centre of the play. She sees the power of love, she sees where ambition can lead a man and she sees evil and names it so.

"O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you."

And she almost survives...

At two hours and 20 minutes, the play is a little too long, the exhilarating first half giving way to a second half in which speeches overpower the pace we had become used to. But few revivals could be more timely - or more equivocal in their prescription for action.

It was still raining at the end.

Venice Preserved is at the Swan Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon until 7 September.

Photo Helen Maybanks

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