Performance review: The Fawn; or Parasitaster by John Marston

Abstract

(5.1.38) – berating Adrianna for her jealousy with outrageous hypocrisy. Observing that Adrianna should have ‘reprehended’Antipholus more roughly for his alleged infidelity, she concludes that he’s gone mad because of his wife’s ‘venom clamours’ (5.1.57, 70). By the end of the play, we’ve all completely forgotten there’s a missing mother in the story, so the revelation of the Abbess’s identity as Aemilia [sic], Egeon’s long-lost wife, always gets one of the play’s biggest laughs, as it did here. But Shakespeare can turn the mood on a sixpence, as the actors did in this production, supported by Dyfan Jones’s hauntingly atmospheric sound design. The Abbess’s concluding speech moves the play into a realm of transcendent joy, emphasised on this occasion by her gentle touch on Adrianna’s stomach as she spoke her final line: ‘After so long grief, such nativity’ (5.1.407) – (less resonantly, ‘festivity’ in the Oxford text). At the end of the show, on both occasions, I was, quite literally, in tears – moved not just by the play’s exquisite, if qualified, resolution, but by the experience of being back in a theatre at a live performance after 18 months in varying degrees of lockdown.