'Tis Pity She's a Whore

There’s something strangely familiar about the room we look into at the opening of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Adorned with pop-culture posters (True Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s), scattered clothes and CDs, a crowded dresser, there’s a lone young woman tapping away on her laptop, sprawled on her bed. When the house lights dim, she pops on a CD and starts to dance. It’s simultaneously enticing and uncomfortable, her liquid sexuality jarring with her girlish face and dress. She draws the rest of the company into the room, controlling and being controlled by them in equal measure, an indisputable object of attention and desire.

As an opening to a play written in 1623, such high-camp theatrics could have fallen flat, but there’s something in the playful, almost ironic energy of this production that allows it to get away with stuff more earnest productions could not. In a play laden with melodrama (brother and sister fall in love, sister marries another, whose jealous ex is hell-bent on exacting revenge, and so it goes) the telenovela vibe prevents it from becoming a dirge or a wrist-slash-fest.

Cheek by Jowl artistic director Declan Donnellan pioneered a classical performance methodology (high energy, movement-driven performances paired with clear, vivid interpretations of the verse) which has had many imitators of varying success. Here, you can see how it works. The entire company remains on stage for much of the action, but it’s not a purely aesthetic choice. Rather, it’s used as a powerful way to highlight the intrusion of the public eye into the private sphere. Similarly, movement sequences never dreamed of by Ford (Annabella dressed as the Madonna; the maid seduced by a Chippendale dancer) are not simply cheap gags but rather visual reinforcements of the contradictions inherent in the social and cultural world inhabited by these characters.

The production’s strength wanes occasionally: jealous Hippolita’s subplot seems to have been treated with less care than the main story, and its relevance is weakened as a result. Those members of the ensemble with smaller roles seem determined to prove the old maxim about there being no such thing, and slow scenes down as a result. And Jack Gordon is strangely blank as Giovanni, a man tormented with love and lust for his own sister.

He’s more than made up for, however, with an absolutely gut-wrenching performance from Lydia Wilson as his sister Annabella. Wavering perfectly between childhood and adulthood, between strength and vulnerability, Wilson’s performance is one of the most finely tuned and perfectly pitched to have graced Sydney stages. One minute she is all teen-angst, complete with eye-rolling and evasive answers to questions, the next an impassioned if terrified lover, all before swinging right through to the glazed, hollow energy of a girl forced into womanhood too fast. The play, and her performance in it, allow for one of the most complex and nuanced depictions of femininity you could hope to find, its implications and explorations lingering and developing long after the play’s gutting final moment.

Though not without its frustrations, ‘Tis Pity is that unfortunately rare creature: a performance that stands up to and is even strengthened by close attention and reflection. You wouldn’t love every minute of it, but you won’t forget it any time soon.