‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Barbican

As Annabella lolls between the sheets, there’s an appropriate confusion in the mess of underwear, toys, rap music, hockey sticks and suggestive bedroom posters – refusing to allow her neat categorisation as mature and worldly or passively impressionable.

Music is well-timed, thumping and brash: conga lines at wedding parties quickly descend into death marches. The cast remain onstage in many of the play’s most intimate moments, allowing for a sense of society’s complicity in each degraded act. Choirs of rising whispers send shivers of apprehension down the spine. Similarly, the use of off-stage party scenes, leaving the main set almost bare of action, has the audience craning their necks, as desperate to bear witness as modern day tribes gathering outside high profile courtroom cases.

At the heart of the action lies Vasques, creating the net that will enmesh them all, scheming and plotting with no real motive other than to punish the lust of women. Perfectly captured by Will Alexander, Vasques croons and flatters his way into disclosure. It’s important to note that in a cast of 12, three are female, all die horribly, and the men survive. Ruth Everett’s wronged-widow Hippolita was the real strength among them, snarling at Annabella, tossing her garish teenage diary to the floor, posing for celebrity magazines pored over by the younger woman. It is she who truly conveys the weight of this “wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy”. Eve Ponsonby as Annabella captured the mingled innocence and latent desire intrinsic to the character, like a child unknowingly mimicking suggestive dancing in music videos. The “fault” lies more in the script itself: so too, for Giovanni, whose rising hysteria and “distracted lust” were capably presented by Orlando James. These characters are props in a wider, more sinister game.

At a sprinting two-hour run, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore effectively portrays the hopelessness of a society that at once condemns and seems to encourage the drama. It does not drag its heels but plunges recklessly forward, much like the lovers themselves. Without such clever staging and use of space it might not stand to scrutiny so well, and some moments of high grief were less credible. However, the play revels in its own hyperbole, and the clash of everyday pop culture amid chaos makes for a wildly energetic, at times deeply disturbing, and ultimately gripping production. As a teenage bedroom becomes a morgue, its peeling, fire-branded Gone with the Wind poster feebly presents normality where there is none. “The torment of an uncontrolled flame” rings as true now as in the 1600s, when hunger simply can’t be fed enough.

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is on at the Barbican until 26th April 2014, for further information or to book visit here.