Polly Findlay directed a performance of Arden of Faversham which was incredibly unique and mesmerizing. She managed to create an entire new world for the characters to inhabit without seeming to make changes just for the sake of changing something. Findlay, in combination with the Royal Shakespeare Company actors, accentuated the strongest aspects of the text without becoming too garish. The character of Susan, played by Elspeth Brodie, particularly stood out to me in both of the performances which our class watched. She was almost missing in the text except as a bargaining chip for Alice and Mosby. She has a total of eleven lines in the text and only a handful of stage directions which usually only denote her entrances and exits, yet she was one of the most important and captivating characters on stage. The portrayal of Susan in Findlay’s version of Arden of Faversham emphasizes the themes of commodification and selfishness from the play, which eventually causes each character to become mentally unstable over time, if they were not already to that point at the beginning.
Elspeth Brodie who plays Susan in Arden of Faversham.
Susan has most of her lines at the end of the play when she is trying to assist her mistress in covering up Arden’s murder, and yet in Findlay’s stage adaptation she was a major presence from the very beginning. During the very unique opening scene (or opening credits?), wherein many of Arden’s workers are cleaning boxes off of the stage while he sits at his desk and the audience filters in to the theatre, Susan is in the background methodically cleaning the huge painted backdrop made of blinds. Her slow movements and meticulous attention to invisible details becomes mesmerizing in contrast to the other workers moving quickly around the stage. Susan also spins around in a circle with her head against her dusting wand when the workers are given short breaks during this scene, again in contrast to the other workers who are primarily still. If any audience members hadn’t noticed her before that moment, many of them whispered to one another about her actions or chuckled about her dizziness. To me, these actions indicated that she may have already slipped into mental instability before the story of the play has even begun. These opening moments draw the viewer in to her character while also setting up background information for the setting and the characters. There is a sense in this play that the characters have a history with one another already and the lack of character arcs for most of the major characters indicates that their personalities are already set before the play. Because there isn’t a sense of development in the characters, and more of one within the plot and story action, it makes the play even more eerie. There isn’t an event or any specific interaction which causes many of the characters to commit their heinous acts, creating discomfort among the audience due to the hyper-realistic quality of this truth within the play. Susan already seems unstable at the beginning of the play, signaling that the selfish nature of the other characters in her life has caused her to become unbalanced before we are even properly introduced to her.
There is a theme of commodification and selfishness throughout this play which is exemplified in the characters, especially Susan. The characters all use selfish motives for their actions. All of the characters hired to kill Arden are doing so for a selfish purpose: Clarke and Michael are doing it to try to have Susan without her approval, Greene wants his lands back, and Shakebag and Blackwill want money. Alice and Mosby selfishly want to kill Arden who has done no visible evil to either of them. Arden is also selfishly motivated by money. He uses his workers as commodities to the point where they appear to have reached varying levels of insanity while working for him at the beginning of the play. Each of their selfish motives causes them to objectify one another and thus treat each other as commodities to be bought, sold, and used at their convenience.
Susan hitting her head on the table upon hearing about her potential marriage to Clarke.
Even Susan uses selfish motivations. When Alice and her brother Mosby use her as a commodity to be bargained with in a negotiation with Clarke, she reacts very strongly by banging her head on the underside of a table she is cleaning in surprise. She even proceeded to shake her head no with a mixture of concern and terror on her face However, every time Alice and/or Mosby were talking to themselves, each other, or someone else about their plan to kill Arden, Susan was impassive. When she was on stage cleaning in the background during Alice and Mosby’s murder plans with Clarke, Michael, Greene, one another, and during their soliloquys she only looked up once. She glanced at Alice when Clarke offered her the poisoned cross, but otherwise she was completely physically engrossed in her work. But even then, when she did look up at Alice, she did not react nearly as expressively as she did when Clarke was offered her hand in marriage. The only time she had an emotional response was when she saw Arden’s dead body and dropped the dinner plates before proceeding to vomit. This is a little bit strange considering her knowledge of the plan all along and her later complicity in physically carrying the body outdoors. At the end of the play when Susan attempts to claim that she should not be punished because she “knew not of it till the deed was done,” it has been so clearly established that this is a lie that Susan, while perhaps appearing virtuous or sympathetic in the text, suddenly becomes just as abhorrent, if not more so, as the other characters.
Brodie and Findlay’s portrayal of Susan was very effective for me as a viewer because of how alive they made a character of seemingly very little significance. They used Susan to draw out many of the main points in the play by showing that she is truly being used as a commodity against her will, but that she is also participating in this society in her own objectionable way. In the text, Susan can become a very sympathetic and innocent seeming character, but by including her in all of the murder planning scenes and having her react to only certain statements they emphasized that no one in this play, or in society, is truly innocent. Susan’s presence on stage and implication in Arden’s murder drew on the relevance that this story has today without being too affected. Susan seemed to represent more of the average person in society despite her seeming ridiculousness. She was more of a passive participator in all of her society’s wrongdoings at the beginning of the play, but then she tried to deny any responsibility for the immoral events which happened as a result, which I think is how many people in our society today respond when they find out how their everyday actions may negatively affect the world. This portrayal was as mesmerizing as it was impactful because of its relevance to current society and to the themes of the play.