I do haunt you still

[sovay]

The Actors' Shakespeare Project's The Duchess of Malfi rocks my world. You who are in the Boston area, I suggest looking into tickets; it is a revenge tragedy, but onstage it reminded me much more of a film noir, an atmosphere which is not at all suggested by the set design—a strip of stage between two one-way mirrors of audience, light spilt like blood or finality between doors always locked, unlocked to be locked again, never ajar; no one is ever untrammeled, private, alone—and therefore all the more interesting to me. Bill Barclay as Bosola, Jennie Israel as the Duchess. There are bones underneath the greatest of houses. You can die suddenly or by degrees or they can be the same thing. What would I do, were this to do again? Also, in performance? Surprising quantities of Webster are funny. Of course, the same holds true for Sweeney Todd. In short, a terrific evening with nineweaving, rushthatspeaks, and gaudior—I will have to hunt down eredien on my own time—and we did not freeze to death hiking from South Station to the China Pearl to the recently ex-warehouse Midway Studios, which was a plus. I hope to write more on this topic tomorrow. I should probably at least try for sleep first.

We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves,
That ruin'd, yield no echo. Fare you well.

Comments

[sovay]

I've always thought that film noir was the 20th century equivalent of Jacobean tragedy.

It held the more films came to mind—I started out with The Maltese Falcon, because Bosola is very much the kind of character Humphrey Bogart would have played, except that Bogart usually discovered he still had a heart left before things went all to hell, but by Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Lady from Shanghai, yeah; there's the same kind of blood on the floor.