★★★
The last night of Chastity on the Verge was a sell-out, with people scrambling on the door for the final ticket, such that a distraught contemporary of mine was even turned away. High praise then for a play which had obviously been the subject of many a recommendation, and not merely amongst the eager first-year French students trying to find any means not to revise simply by watching a 13th century text on stage instead.
This adaptation of the medieval courtly love narrative, La Châtelaine de Vergi, took a distinctly comic tone from the outset. To hard-core readers of the original text, travesty was afoot. Comedy is not an immediately central feature of the story, but Rachel Dickenson as the Narrator nevertheless welcomed the audience with light-hearted bounce, and by the time the Duchess and the Knight had appeared on stage, I found myself warming to the bubbly atmosphere which this production favoured. Kate Bennett was superb as the manipulative Duchess, with everything from her hand gestures to her delicate savouring of the verse oozing pure malevolence while still maintaining that hitherto intriguing element of comedy. The Knight, played by Markian Mysko von Schultze, was another terrific performance. Von Schultze managed to balance incredible sincerity with boldly comic lines, and succeeded in this rather difficult task perhaps the best of all the characters.
Such is the nature of the text that it takes a distinctly tragic turn, and at the Duchess’s revelation of the Knight and the Châtelaine’s secret love affair, which will, by dint of the principles of courtly love, obliterate their relationship, the adaptation’s insistence on the comic began to become unconvincing. The Châtelaine (Grace Mayhew) acted as the final bastion of tragedy in the piece, but whilst her touching monologue and the transition from the Knight’s drunken idiocy to the horror of realisation at his lover’s death heralded a poignant end, this was not entirely to be the case. Christopher Evans as the Duke continued his commendable but in my opinion slightly off-the-mark portrayal of a man who was having a bad day at the office, rather than someone who had just killed his wife and seen his niece and his most loved vassal lie down and die. To accompany this was a hysterical servant girl who it seemed was unsure whether she should burst out laughing or start blubbing uncontrollably. The audience were left unsure as well.
The temptation to inspire comedy into a typically tragic tale is entirely understandable, and one which was highly successful in charming the audience, something to which the guffaws of laughter throughout the 40-minute performance are testament. Maybe I went in as a French student trying too hard, a week before Prelims, to eke some higher meaning from what was essentially a very enjoyable way to spend part of an evening.
However, I just can’t help but feel that by trying to present the poem in such a different light to the original Old French, Chastity on the Verge at times left its audience confused – was it a comedy with a morally tragic conclusion or a comedy outright? It didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, but then again I’m not sure the original text does either.
