'Tis Pity She's a Whore

                                                                photo: Richard Termine

Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void deals with the incestuous love between a brother and a sister. Set against the strip clubs and drug dens of a hallucinatory Tokyo, with a nod to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film also provides a good deal of backstory that enables the viewer to believe in the characters. The British Company Cheek by Jowl now offers a production of one of the most infamously incestuous dramas of all time, the Elizabethan playwright, John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Where the brother and sister of Enter the Void have been brought together earlier in life after their parents are killed in an automobile accident, the challenge of staging 'Tis Pity lies in the fact that the intimacy of Ford’s two characters is de facto, functioning primarily as a premise to ignite the ensuring revenge drama. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary is transformed to John Ford Our Contemporary for Declan Donnellan’s production at BAM. The adolescent Annabella’s (Lydia Wilson) room is covered with film posters from classics like Gone With the Wind,  Breakfast at Tiffany’s and True Blood. True Blood is the one citation that has some relevance to a bloody revenge tragedy that ends with a broken hearted lover sawing out his beloved’s heart; the red set of the teenager’s bedroom also recalls Brian De Palma's  film version of Stephen King’s Carrie. Though Ford was censored for ‘Tis Pity, there is no doubt that the perversity of the love is one of the reasons it has survived and continued to attract directors. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (presented in theatrical form with Carrie Mulligan last summer) also dealt with incest between a brother in sister who like Noe's characters are orphaned albeit in a more metaphorical sense--by a narcissistic artistic parent. Cheek By Jowl’s production helplessly flails with surfaces in an attempt to lay its mark on Ford’s work. It’s one distinction lies in showing how an interpretation that initially turns tragedy into bedroom farce can result in a bloodbath.