Tis Pity

The problem with putting on revenge tragedies is that it's bloody hard not to make all that bloodiness look bloody silly. Evidently this is also true of updated productions.

Gregory has fallen violently in love with his virginal sister, Anita. This poses a problem: not only is she his sister but she is also betrothed to the son of a powerful neighbouring family. An incestuous affair and four deaths (or is that five? I lost count) later - and Natalie Audley's 1950s reimagining of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has shown itself only marginally less Tarantino than the original. And even less credible. Can we really believe a young girl growing up in a well-off family in the fifties would have been kept entirely cloistered from the world? And were swords, not guns, the upper-class weapon of choice?

By far the oddest aspect of the re-write is Audley's antiquated dialogue. Although she has abandoned Ford's original script, the update sounds in no way modern. You half expect the characters to drop in the occasional "forsooth".

A halfway house modernisation is a potentially interesting experiment but here it is not a successful one. Nothing is gained by Audley's update and the 1950s setting isn't integrated into the play; if anything relocating Ford's plot relocated makes it seem even more absurd. Although the cast perform with commendable earnestness, they can't stop the audience from giggling throughout the final blood bath.