He tries to persuade her to a suicide pact but each deceives the other. Lodovico and Gasparo complete their revenge by killing both of them. So effective was the accumulation of poisonings, stabbings, shootings, and garrotings at Thursday's matinee that a schoolgirl on the front banquette of the warm, wooden quasi-Elizabethan interior, fainted during the last act, banged her head on the front of the apron stage and revived a few minutes later only to see that the carnage was still in full flow. While Edward Bond's rewrite of the piece 20 years ago pointed up the heartlessness in the machinations of the corrupt Italian court by draining the action of passion, Gale Edwards's production goes for the real gung-ho goriness. The stage steams with lust.
Bodices are unlaced, bodkins bared and codpieces set a-quivering.
Webster's wonderful, hermetic world of vice, metaphor and chain reaction, unimpeded by subplots, takes us to the heart of darkness and corruption. While Flamineo is revealed as a cut-throat transformed by experience, and an impressive Philip Quast leads a perverse mission of mercy as the devoted Lodovico. The Swan was founded to explore the repertoire, and to reassess, not reassert, masterpieces, but The White Devil is so rarely seen, and usually bowdlerised, that this production is fully vindicated.