A Woman Killed with Kindness at the National Theatre, Review by Huntley Dent

L-R Sebastian Armesto (Wendoll), Paul Ready (John Frankford), Gawn Granger (Nicholas), Liz White (Anne Frankford). Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

Too clever by halves. Although T.S. Eliot was describing Marlowe's once popular, now buried play, The Jew of Malta, when he dubbed it a savage farce, the phrase is a wide paintbrush for Jacobean tragedy, whose absurd motivations, wildly outsized emotions and sheer body count tempt us to burst out laughing. One of the breeziest writers of the day, Thomas Heywood, shuffled genres like a card sharp, and there's no reason to believe that he took his most famous tragedy, A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) too seriously. There's not much reason to revive it either, except as a study in stage contraptions antecedent to the great age of folderol bien fait in the Victorian theater, which gave us masterly contrivers like Scribe, Sardou, and the like.

To prove me wrong, director Katie Mitchell has tried to make more of A Woman Killed With Kindness than Heywood put into it...

Read more at the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.