The Stage

The Changeling

Published Friday 3 February 2012 at 11:01 by Natasha Tripney

An air of lunacy permeates Middleton and Rowley’s play. The asylum subplot taints the main plot - it is indeed a mad world. Joe Hill-Gibbins’ frequently thrilling production captures this sense of over-spill. It’s messy and excessive in a way that is only fitting.

Alex Beckett (Lollio), Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Antonio) and Jessica Raine (Beatrice-Joanna) in The Changeling at the Young Vic Photo: Keith Pattison

The set, designed by Ultz, has an institutional feel, with the audience seated around the edges, on pews or behind wire screens, and the pitch of the piece becomes increasingly absurd as events progress and the line between sanity and madness becomes all the more porous. The lunatics jibber and dribble. Food is flung about the place. The wedding masque throbs to a Beyonce backing track and concludes with DeFlores deflowering Beatrice-Joanna on a table.

The rapidity of the pacing is at times problematic, and the arc of the play towards tragedy and corruption a little skewed, but the production’s anarchic, almost operatic energy more than makes up for this.

Daniel Cerqueira is initially upright as the pocked and misused DeFlores, but he plausibly allows his lust for Jessica Raine’s manipulative Beatrice-Joanna to overrule his good sense. Raine gives a good account of a selfish girl who gets in over her head, who awakens something dreadful and is then consumed by it. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith slides from charming suitor to vengeful husband with alarming ease, while the rest of the cast double their roles, apt in a play where everyone has - at least - two faces.