Loves’s Sacrifice
Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
2/5

JOHN FORD’S plays came at the tail end of that great explosion of dramatic creativity centred on Shakespeare at a moment when, according to some commentators, “the Elizabethan drama had worked itself out.”

Ford is recognised mainly for his emotionally powerful ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, where doomed incestuous passion drives the play.

And in Love’s Sacrifice, possibly given its first professional production since its 1633 premiere, the focus is again on passion frustrated by honour.

Part of the RSC’s Swan Theatre brief is to explore the works of the Bard’s lesser known contemporaries. The obvious echoes of Othello, scheduled for Stratford’s main house, have prompted exhuming a play which features conventional grotesque elements of the period’s drama — such as a masque camouflaging a savage revenge murder — and a spectacular gory finale, along with the corrupt social influence of the church.

But the play, in which protagonist Fernando is torn by his love for Bianca, the young commoner wife of his bosom friend, the Duke of Pavia, labours to find a convincing dramatic coherence.

She struggles against her own feelings for him but eventually offers herself, only to find his vows of friendship are agonisingly stronger than love. Meanwhile, the Duke’s sister, incensed by the rejection of her own ardour for Fernando, plots with the Duke’s secretary to make her brother believe he has been cuckolded. Inevitably, a bloodbath ensues.

At heart all the major contemporary tragedies find their own distinctive voice but here Ford’s language is betrayed by false artifice as in the Duke’s lament that “the ashy paleness of my cheek is scarletting with burning flakes of wrath.”

The self-consciousness of that imagery is reflected in Matthew Dunster’s production, which seems mistrustful of Ford’s dramatic intention, with a hard-working cast seemingly unconvinced of the psychology of their roles.

Matthew Needham’s Duke portrays the neurotic energy of an adolescent while Catrin Stewart’s Bianca only convinces when Ford allows her to express suicidally her true feelings towards her avenging husband.

Jonathan McGuiness’s Iago-like figure, the self-serving D’Avolos, has none of his model’s burning resentment towards his victims, while Ford’s attempt at comic relief with Matthew Kelly’s foppish buffoon Mauruccio falls flat.

But Anna Fleischle’s impressive set — a great projected cathedral-like colonnade transforming the Swan’s intimate space — is unhappily not able to enliven a play that history had understandably forgotten.

Runs until June 24, box office: rsc.org.uk