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Blessed by the spirit of Shakespeare

Charles Spencer on The Herbal Bed, Barbican Pit

9 November 1996


PETER WHELAN's The Herbal Bed, first seen at Stratford in May, seems better than ever on renewed acquaintance. It's a marvellous piece, tender, wise and generous of spirit. I haven't seen a finer play this year.

Whelan has seized on one of the most tantalising facts about Shakespeare's life. In 1613 his elder daughter, Susanna, married to the respected Stratford physician John Hall, was slandered by one John Lane (Jack in the play), who said she had "the runinge of the reynes" (gonorrhoea) and had been "naught [naughty] with Rafe Smith". Susanna brought a charge of defamation against him in the diocesan court at Worcester Cathedral.

'From these bare facts Whelan has created a remarkably persuasive and touching portrait of a family in crisis. Every character comes to life and, although he doesn't appear, Shakespeare is a powerful presence; by the end you feel you have come extraordinarily close to this most elusive of figures.

Whelan presents Jack as a well-born but dissolute young gent with lascivious eyes and wandering hands. He is studying medicine under Susanna's husband, a puritan of great but chilly decency, who decides that Jack is unfit to become a doctor. Jack's slander is therefore motivated by spite. But Whelan thickens the dramatic stew by suggesting that Susanna was indeed attracted to Rafe Smith, an unhappy family friend, and there is a beautiful, erotic night scene in the herbal garden, when the couple are interrupted just as they are about to make love.

The play contrasts the rigid certainties of puritanism with the less predictable promptings of the human heart. Susanna, played with intelligence and warmth by Teresa Banham, respects her husband but cannot love him. Her emotional openness coupled with her pragmatic willingness to lie to serve a greater good suggest a woman Shakespeare would have been proud to call his daughter.

There is a thrillerish element in the second half when the case comes to court and the rigorous, puritanical Vicar-General (excellent Stephen Boxer) tenaciously tests the truth of the witnesses. Since we know they are lying the dramatic suspense is high and it would be wrong to give away the ending. Suffice to say, Whelan's exploration of what Susanna calls "love's alchemy" is deeply moving. He writes beautifully - there's no attempt at cod Shakespearean verse, but his limpid dialogue is touched with real poetry.

There isn't a weak performance in Michael Attenborough's enthralling production. Liam Cunningham captures the granite integrity and emotional coldness of Dr Hall, David Tennant is at once contemptible and oddly endearing as the slanderous ne'er-do-well, and Joseph Fiennes gives a performance of raw anguish as the self-tormenting lover. Even the maid (the sparky Jo McInnes) becomes a character of real depth.

The evening's final words "gently . . . gently" sum up the mood of this humane play, which seems haunted and blessed by the spirit of Shakespeare himself. What's needed now is a revival of Whelan's The School of Night, an almost equally fine piece about Marlowe and Shakespeare. The two would make a terrific double bill.


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