The Duchess of Malfi - Lace Market Theatre, Review

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi at Lace Market Theatre arrives drenched in bloodstained curtains, steampunk spectacle, industrial gloom, and enough Jacobean misery to last a lifetime. Director Nik Hedges throws everything at the material with relentless intensity, refusing to let the audience escape the darkness. The problem is that Webster’s play only really works when the horror has something human to corrupt. If every scene begins at an emotional breaking point, where exactly is left for the tragedy to climb?

Photo Credit: Grace Eden

The Duchess of Malfi follows a widowed Duchess who secretly marries her steward, Antonio, against the wishes of her controlling brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal. Spies, paranoia, lust, and revenge close in around her, until her private love story collapses into murder, madness, and an increasingly catastrophic body count. Children are born and murdered, and no one is safe from the hands of the people they thought they could trust. 

Nik Hedges’ adaptation pushes the production firmly into a steampunk-inspired world of darkness, industrial textures, and institutional horror. It is visually committed, even if some of the ideas do not fully connect. The evening opens inside a beautifully choreographed mental asylum, with performers already onstage, twitching, hissing, and clawing at their costumes. It is an arresting image. The difficulty comes when the production almost immediately abandons it. The asylum aesthetic doesn’t integrate into the wider storytelling, and when madness later becomes important, there is no visual or performative connection to that opening scene.

Mollie Kneeshaw’s Duchess gives the evening its emotional anchor. Rather than approach the text with a presentational, bombastic style that occasionally feels closer to “performing Jacobean tragedy” than living inside it, Kneeshaw finds genuine force in stillness and clarity. Her Duchess possesses intelligence, resolve, and emotional gravity without constantly having to announce them. The audience invests in her quickly, which becomes both the production’s greatest strength and its structural weakness. Once the Duchess dies, the show loses its centre of gravity.

Tom Pluse’s Antonio complements Kneeshaw extremely well. Their chemistry avoids easy romantic clichés; they feel neither like starry-eyed lovers nor like purely political partners. Their scenes carry a quiet tension that suits Webster’s dangerous world. Pluse clearly understands the rhythm of the language; he trusts Webster’s prose to land without forcing every emotional beat into capital letters. That confidence makes him consistently watchable.

Paul Spruce as Bosola. Photo Credit. Grace Eden.

Paul Spruce’s Bosola delivers a standout performance in this production. Spruce’s Bosola feels dangerous because he appears to think before he speaks. The physicality helps enormously, too: the posture, timing, and controlled stillness set him apart from the more theatrical performances around him. Spruce gives the production its sharpest and most psychologically interesting work.

This production delivers a bold aesthetic. The blood-soaked drapes designed by Hedges and built by Guy Evans really establish the macabre atmosphere. The sheets are cleverly used to hide bodies, to announce a change in location, and to generally unsettle the audience. But the repeated act of drawing curtains open and closed sometimes becomes traffic rather than storytelling.

Philip Hogarth’s lighting design leans heavily into darkness and saturated colour washes. This fits Webster’s oppressive world beautifully. In practice, it becomes visually exhausting. Characters disappear into muddy pools of blue-wash colour, making scenes feel flat at the exact moments they need sharpening. Several scenes involving Bosola’s investigations become harder work than they should be because the lighting does not guide the audience toward dramatic focus. There is a heap of craft and creativity here, but it occasionally forgets that the fundamentals of lighting design are to let the audience see what is important.

Jonathan Blacknell’s sound design constantly underscores the scenes, creating definite moods, and the music cleverly establishes period, location, and emotional temperature. Yet the decision to sustain sound continuously across scenes eventually works against the actors rather than supporting them. One outdoor soundscape, featuring a persistent cricket, becomes genuinely distracting after several minutes, becoming a high-pitched endurance test. Silence would have been a far more powerful creative choice in many of these scenes; Webster’s language already carries enough weight on its own.

David Field as Ferdinand. Photo Credit: Grace Eden.

David Field attacks Ferdinand with aggressive commitment; nobody could accuse him of holding back. The difficulty is that Ferdinand begins in such a volcanic emotional state that the later descent into mania has nowhere left to go, and Field delivers this with a constant energetic certainty.

Chris Sims gives the Cardinal an enjoyably understated chilliness, although some of the production’s sexual choices around the character feel more blunt than insightful. Emma Rayner, meanwhile, brings welcome light into the evening both through her pre-show cello performance and her role within the action. Whenever Rayner appears, the production briefly remembers that Webster also wrote irony, absurdity, and flashes of humour alongside the horror. Michelle Smith’s Delia is another genuinely compelling presence. Smith gives Delia intelligence and emotional awareness, which makes it frustrating when the script sidelines her for long stretches.

The wider ensemble, including Fiona Bumann, Fred Baker, Richard Young, Lucie Conroy, Jake Black, Kathryn Edwards, and Joe Moore, work incredibly hard across multiple roles, helping sustain the production’s constant sense of movement and decay. There is no shortage of commitment anywhere on this stage.

At nearly three hours, Webster’s text is brimming with brutality and despair, but it also contains wit, seduction, absurdity, and moments of dangerous intimacy. By coating almost every scene in an oppressive texture, the production sticks to its intentions to make this play truly devastating. There is something admirable about the sheer scale of the ambition here. Lace Market Theatre have not played safe. They have created something uncompromisingly theatrical, and that alone deserves recognition.

This may not be a flawless Duchess, but it is certainly a memorable one. Fans of dark classical theatre will find plenty to chew on. In the end, Lace Market Theatre’s The Duchess of Malfi leaves you impressed by its determination, exhausted by its excesses, and very aware that at Malfi, everybody loses their head eventually.