Review: THE MASSIVE TRAGEDY OF MADAME BOVARY, Southwark Playhouse

In a moment of early fourth wall breaking, we learned that quite a few of us had read Flaubert’s realist masterpiece, Madame Bovary. I guess a fair few loved it too, but maybe not as much as I did, going on to write an essay on his fellow realist, Gustave Courbet’s epic Un enterrement à Ornans, to which I still pay homage every time I’m in Paris, and even tackling L'éducation sentimentale, which lacks Emma and quite a lot else from his earlier tour de force. I was looking forward to seeing how John Nicholson (writer) and Kirstie Davis (director) would do what Taika Waititi did with JoJo Rabbit - take a serious book and transform it into a comedy.

That movie felt like a unique feat of alchemy at the time and I’m afraid my opinion has not been changed after nearly two and a half hours (!!) of wholehearted buffoonery, misunderstandings and even a bit of children’s party magic. What seemed on reading the programme to be an ambitious goal, proved as much.

But not for the want of trying. Georgia Nicholson gives us an Emma as would be played by Barbara Windsor in Carry On Yonville - mardy then flirty then mardy again - the comedy broad and reductive rather than subtle and nuanced. We get only the smallest of hints of her terrible emotional isolation (Darren Seed’s gives us an asexual Charles Bovary as an even-dimmer Lieutenant George-type schoolboy in a man’s body with a Charlie Chaplin walk) and, in consequence, her foolish decisions come across as selfish rather than tragic. The opportunity of leaning into one of literature’s great female characters is refused, her complexity flattened rather than re-purposed, her seductive mystery ignored, the tragedy not so much massive as lost.

Stephen Cavanagh and Ben Kernow get through an enormous amount of work (and an enormous amount of regional accents) in portraying a range of supporting characters, as Emma slides towards her doom. There are so many props, quick changes and calls out to unseen persons backstage that I was reminded of one of Ernie Wise’s ‘plays what I wrote’, a staple format of television light entertainment in the 70s. It’s a chaotic, throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach that can sustain an Edinburgh show, but I remind you of the run time. 

The show seems misconceived as much as anything, the gamechanging ball Emma attends proving impossible to conjure with minimal sets and props, her power of men (and their power of her) asserted rather than demonstrated, swamped by the need for another exaggeration, another joke. The venue is too large too, laughter, being infectious, needs humans at close quarters in order to spread.

The only time the mood relents is in a denouement that reasonably questions whether all these 19th century heroines of novels (and operas, I might add) need to be silenced by their fates to meet an early grave. In contrast with much that had gone before, it was a hurried piece of exposition and I regret to say that I wasn’t quite sure of what point was actually being made, seemingly that Emma would be as ill-served by a 21st century rescue as by her 19th century demise. 

Alas, we had never built up sufficient empathy with her, or with the dismal men with whom she associated, to care much either way.   

The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary is at Southwark Playhouse until 11 January 2025

Photo Credits: Tanya Pabaru

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