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THE CHANGELING THE CAST VERMANDERO Ken Bones BEATRICE-JOANNA Anna Koval TOMAZO DE PIRAQUO Daon Broni ALONSO DE PIRAQUO Gabriel Fleary ALSEMERO Gideon Turner JASPERINO Ian Mercer ALIBIUS Terrence Hardiman ISABELLA Marianne Oldham LOLLIO David Cardy PEDRO/FRANCISCUS Leon Williams ANTONIO Geoffrey Lumb DEFLORES Adrian Schiller DIAPHANTA Samantha Lawson CREATIVE TEAM DIRECTOR Stephen Unwin SET DESIGNER Paul Wills COSTUME DESIGNER Mark Bouman LIGHTING DESIGNER Ben Ormerod COMPOSER Olly Fox ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Suba Das FIGHT DIRECTOR Jonathan Waller CHOREOGRAPHER Susannah Broughton VOICE COACH Catherine Weate CASTING DIRECTOR Ginny Schiller PRODUCER Rachel Tackley This production opened at the Nottingham Playhouse on 28 th September 2007 4
STEPHEN UNWIN ON THE CHANGELING The Changeling (1622) is a perplexing mixture of styles and genres. From one perspective it is a classic Jacobean revenge drama: set in Catholic Spain, it is explicit about sex and violence, mixes the tragic with the grotesque, and offers little in the way of consolation or social reform. From another, it is an acutely perceptive domestic drama about the conflicting claims of familial duty and sexual desire. The play’s main plot is a love triangle; the aristocratic beauty Beatrice-Joanna and the handsome visitor Alsemero have fallen in love with each other; her father, Vermandero, however, has agreed to marry her off to the eligible young bachelor Alonso de Piracquo. Meanwhile, Vermandero’s disfigured manservant Deflores is in love with Beatrice-Joanna and wants her for himself, yet she in turn finds him utterly repulsive. The working out of these conflicting passions is the motor of the tragic action. In their portrait of Beatrice-Joanna, Middleton and Rowley have drawn an intelligent and highly sexed young aristocrat who is prepared to do anything, including risk damnation, to get what she desires. In her nemesis, Deflores (the ‘deflowerer’), they show the extent a man will go to be with a woman with whom he is obsessed. By the end of the play they deserve each other. As Alsemero says to Deflores: Clip your adulteress freely. Tis the pilot Will guide you to the Mare Mortuum Where you will sink to fathoms bottomless. (5.3) The treatment is exceptionally acute in its psychological perception, even as it retains the highest level of moral discrimination. The subplot tells a parallel story, but with a comic outcome. The asylum keeper Alibius is jealously possessive of his young wife, Isabella, but does little to show her any affection or love. Two young men, Franciscus and Antonio, are both obsessed with her but are reduced to pretending to be mad fools in order to see her. Meanwhile Alibius’ servant, Lollio, wants her too, but cannot get any further than sexual innuendo and bawdy jokes. They are all defeated by Isabella’s fidelity. If the main plot shows how untramelled sexual desire can lead to murder and your own death, the subplot shows the more common experience; that it results in foolishness and humiliation. Little is known about William Rowley, the comic actor who was largely responsible for the scenes in the madhouse. But Thomas Middleton, who wrote the main plot, was one of the leading dramatists of his time, and defies the usual characterisation of the Jacobean playwright as champion of the status quo and loyal supporter of the King. As Margot Heinemann shows in her definitive study, Puritanism and the Theatre, Middleton was associated with the opposition forces which would, within a generation, bring down the monarchy. She also argues that Middleton, like Ibsen 250 years later, wrote about women of all classes with tremendous empathy and realism. His portrait of Beatrice-Joanna demonstrates just how rapacious and amoral certain strands of the aristocracy could be. He prefers instead to put his faith in the wisdom and decency of the middle class Isabella, or the healthy appetites of the freethinking servant girl Diaphanta. The result is a play which, with its cinematic technique, intercut soliloquies, and quickfire dialogue, is one of the most theatrical plays in the repertoire. What’s more, its acute psychological realism makes it astonishingly contemporary. Realism is the true language of the modern theatre and The Changeling is one of its key texts. If, ultimately, it cannot share the rarefied air occupied by Hamlet and King Lear, it looks forward to a world in which kings and queens no longer rule over us, and the intricate lives of ordinary men and women can become the subject of great tragedy. The much despised Deflores speaks for us all: Why, am not I an ass to devise ways Thus to be railed at? I must see her still. I shall have a mad qualm within this hour again I know, and like a common Garden bull I do but take breath to be lugged again. What this may bode I know not. I’ll despair the less Because there’s daily precedents of bad faces Beloved beyond all reason. These foul chops May come into favour one day amongst his fellows. Wrangling has proved the mistress of good pastime. As children cry themselves asleep, I have seen Women have chid themselves abed to men. (2.1) 5
Page 1 and 2: 25 Short Street London SE1 8LJ T: 0
Page 3: CREATIVE POLICY ETT is England’s
Page 7 and 8: THOMAS MIDDLETON (1580-1627) Middle
Page 9 and 10: JACOBEAN DRAMA The term ‘Jacobean
Page 11 and 12: MADNESS AND SANITY IN THE 17 TH CEN
Page 13 and 14: [ACT 2 SCENE 2] BEATRICE-JOANNA ...
Page 15 and 16: INTERVIEW WITH MARK BOUMAN Costume
Page 17 and 18: INTERVIEW WITH PAUL WILLS Set Desig
Page 19 and 20: INTERVIEW WITH TIMANDRA DYER Produc
Page 21 and 22: The Role of Women Questions: • Do
Page 23 and 24: ASSISTANT DIRECTOR’S ESSAY by Sub
Page 25 and 26: enough, she doesn’t blush, whatev
Page 27 and 28: Terrence But it’s the unmarried o
Page 29 and 30: PLACING THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY LA
Page 31 and 32: 2. WRITING EXERCISE In pairs, spend
Page 33: FURTHER READING The Changeling, by

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