Before seeing the performance of Arden of Faversham, our class had a brief recap at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to go over what it was about and what to expect from the performance. The lecturer showed us a quote from the director Polly Findlay claiming that her production was inspired by the style of the Coen brothers. I was intrigued when I heard this, but somewhat doubting the director’s ability to pull it off. Once I saw the play, however, all of my highest expectations were exceeded. The world of Findlay’s Arden of Faversham deliberately develops and works to sustain a tension in the audience that corresponds to the tension in the characters onstage.
This play never lets its audience relax or feel comfortable. I shuddered at the disturbingly creepy painter Clarke and his handling of the maid Susan. What he might do to her was never articulated, but from the way he walked around her and eyed her like she was prey, smelling her hair, spiderwalking his fingers up her arm, and Susan’s own horrified reaction to him, it was clear that it would be awful. In a similar way, both the anticipated and actual violence in the play made me wince – the spray of blood as Shakebag cracked Will across the face with a crowbar, Will preparing to cut off Michael’s ear and stopping at the last moment, and the drawn-out brutal murder of Arden. I wasn’t alone in my reactions; I could hear my fellow audience members respond with me. The audience doesn’t often react audibly to a play with much more than laughter, and I both heard and participated in groans and gasps in all of the aforementioned scenes.
Increasing the tension even more, there’s a short scene staged entirely in the dark; the audience can see nothing, only hear. All of the lights go down, and the sinister Shakebag begins a brief monologue. He starts by standing behind the audience, slowly moving through until he reaches the stage. The actor’s rich, deep, and chilling voice put me on edge, and from talking to my classmates, they had similar uneasy responses. I half expected something to jump out at me, but of course nothing did – that would be too much of a cheap trick for this excellent production, and it would have allowed for a premature release of tension. This production was clearly trying to sustain the audience’s state of suspense, indicated by the decision to perform the play without an interval. The audience doesn’t get a break from Arden‘s oppressive atmosphere – release only comes at the end.
One scene in particular stands out to me as brilliant staging and masterful creation of tension; if I remember nothing else about this play, although I certainly hope I do, this scene will be what sticks with me. After Arden’s murder, the conspirators must find a way to quickly hide his body. This production set in the modern day portrays Arden as an extremely wealthy manufacturer of cheap kitsch, and his body ends up being packed into a box for his own merchandise – the logo Arden of Faversham stamped on it suddenly taking on a double darker meaning as a description of contents as well as the brand. A crane from Arden’s warehouse is lowered, and just as at the beginning when it was used to haul away packaged Arden merchandise, it now lifts up the box containing Arden’s body. Unlike earlier however, it does not comfortably disappear up into the rafters – it hangs there, high above the stage and still very much a stage presence. For me personally, nothing else in the play matched the suspense created by the literal suspension of Arden’s body over the stage as Alice tries to host a dinner party and act normally. An average production would simply rely on the tension created by the audience’s anticipation of the murderers being caught, but Findlay takes it to the next level by having Alice’s guilt literally hang over her.
I was incredibly anxious during this scene; the box wasn’t hanging level, and, conscious that it was opening night and the actors weren’t as practiced, I was legitimately afraid that it might fall. My nerves certainly weren’t helped by the fact that the box swayed for a bit after it had been raised. And during the entire scene this grating elevator music was playing – it had played in a warehouse scene at the opening of the play, and Alice had turned it on to entertain and distract her husband before his murder. For whatever reason, perhaps its sheer awfulness and banality, the music irritated me and only made me more tense. What a ridiculous juxtaposition between this silly, terrible music and the gravity of Arden’s body hanging over the stage!
Of course, the production doesn’t cultivate tension in the audience just for kicks – the tension that we feel puts us in the same boat as the characters that we’re watching. Almost all of them are tense or unhappy in some way; certainly none of them are relaxed. Much of this tension arises from the heavy focus on class conflicts, a prominent theme in the text largely shown in Arden’s indignation that Alice could prefer someone of a lower class to him. However, Findlay’s production heightens this sense of conflict and extends it throughout the entire play – particularly through characters’ wardrobes. The inspired costume choices immediately makes each character’s class easily recognizable, saying so much without a single word.
Arden and Franklin dress like the members of the 1% that they are, wearing tasteful but clearly expensive suits in appropriate colors – Arden in a blue blazer and a contrast collar shirt. Their classic style of dress makes them, old money, contrast dramatically with the class-climbing Mosby, who wears a suit in an eye-catching shade of purple, with matching shirt and tie. He’s dressed expensively but far too extravagantly for the high status he’s working to achieve. He’s working too hard to impress, while men like Arden and Franklin don’t need to. Members of the poorer class are also represented by Greene, in a track suit, running shoes and ponytail, and Mrs. Reede, dressed as a supermarket teller in a green smock, scrunchie, and comfortable-looking but unattractive shoes. Their land was taken away from them and given to Arden, and the stark difference in their wealth, indicated by their costumes, shows the injustice of that action and the callousness of Arden dismissing them. The production’s costumes work to highlight the class conflicts in Arden of Faversham, which, along with other interpersonal conflicts, gives the whole play a tense atmosphere.
The tension and suspense that the audience feels reflects what the characters are feeling. We can’t relax or get comfortable, but they can’t either. In fact, the final moment of release at the end only comes with the death of six characters. The conclusion left me stunned, as I believe it was designed to. As it turns out, the director herself had been sitting in front of me during the performance, and after it ended, she immediately turned around and asked if anything had been confusing or difficult to follow. Still awed, I could barely form a response other than no, although I might have used the word mindblowing. With some time and distance from the performance, I’ve hopefully been able to better articulate just what so impressed me about Findlay’s Arden of Faversham.