'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE
Written by JOHN FORD
Chris Meads terrific revival of Tis Pity She’s A Whore at the Liverpool Everyman took me straight back to the oppressive Sundays of my childhood…it’s a wonderfully judged production and well worth seeing… Ford's play takes its title from the final condemnatory line spoken by the Cardinal, but Meads's fluid, layered staging presents Annabella as the innocent, often thoughtful victim of a fiery passion.
Chris Meads’ direction has not only imbued each character with vitality, colour and depth, it’s also provided a spectacle that is every bit as shocking and thought provoking as surely it was on the play’s original opening night. A fabulous play that is written, directed and performed with real sparkle, intelligence and ultimate bravery, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore underlines still further what the Everyman Theatre is really all about.
Shorn of its comic subplot, John Ford's 1633 tragedy becomes a short sharp shocker in Chris Meads's atmospheric revival, which relocates the action to the late 1950s. Matti Houghton's Annabella is still very much a schoolgirl in her gym knickers and grey pinafore when her brother Giovanni returns from university demanding that she love him or kill him. This transgressive love will prove fatal to them both in a claustrophobic world where the candles endlessly flicker in a shrine to the idea of the perfect woman: one who is a virtuous wife and mother and very dead.
'Tis Pity She's A Whore played in the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool in tandem with Slung Low's Anthology. Together, these two productions played in rep as Everyman Unbound, a season of work that celebrated the Everyman Theatre's spirit of dare and invention, prior to it's closure for redevelopment.
