The Making of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Siren Productions

GIOVANNI HAS been a few things in his time: a brilliant student, a brother and a lover (the last two roles he disastrously chose to combine). To this list director Selina Cartmell adds another role, more unsettling and unanswerable. Now he is a director. Worse than that, Siren Production’s new staging-cum-screening of John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy makes clear, he is an auteur.

With his hair whipped into a silver quiff and his face solemn behind stern glasses, Louis Lovett taps out his shooting script on a typewriter and seals his destiny. “Lost! I am lost! My fates have doom’d my death”. He is accompanied in this effort by a tip-toe bass from Conor Linehan’s composition as the text flickers above him via Killian Waters’s video design, while Sinéad McKenna’s brilliantly woozy lighting makes it seem only slightly odd that a camera crew seem to dance into life around him, or that his doomed beloved, Kate Stanley Brennan, resplendent in a 1960s wedding minidress, will talk backwards. You quickly realise what’s happening: John Ford, the controversial morbid sensationalist, has finally been David Lynch-ed.

Rather than use this conceit as a framing device – by having Lovett announce his intentions to write, direct and star in an adaptation, for instance – Cartmell etches her concept over Ford’s text like a director’s commentary.

Visually, it’s coherent: you know the function and personality of everyone in the crew. But it makes the play seem confusing and oddly unimportant. That’s why you find yourself admiring a teasing bedroom scene between Lovett and Brennan’s spirited Annabella, both of them excellent and styled like underwear models (“You are wanton!”, she giggles, as he films her) without getting any queasy signal of an incestuous relationship between brother and sister.

As a piece of theatre, the bigger compromise is to let recorded sequences dominate the live performance. Apart from Brennan and Lovett, who each get screen time, certain characters appear only on film, such as Tom Hickey’s fretting Friar and a perfectly-judged Laurel-and-Hardy double-act from Simon Delaney and Paul Reid.

These scenes allow for witty filmic references, a grammar of genres and ages, reverse shots and POV, yet the high remove of the screens that Sabine Dargent’s set allows, dwarfs the stage actors and staggers the play’s lucidity. You appreciate discreet elements, if not a continuity. Cathy Belton is dependably vampish as a diva playing the vengeful, spurned Hippolita, and in a clever succession of scenes Phelim Drew’s duped Soranzo torments Brennan with a handgun before Lovett accosts her with a handheld camera. It’s impossible to say which is more violent. Cartmell lands that point with the greatest effect: art is an obsession to eclipse even the most illicit passions. But though her production ends with arias of emotion and a visually impressive coup, it is never moving. Even an exposed human heart is just another stylish effect.

Until December 17th