The Duchess [of Malfi] at Trafalgar Theatre review: it’s thrilling to see Jodie Whittaker back on stage

Jodie Whittaker makes a bold return to the stage after 12 years away, in Zinnie Harris’s uneven updating of John Webster’s brutal Jacobean tragedy. It’s an overblown peach of a role for the star of Doctor Who and Broadchurch, packed with passion, grandeur, and the gamut of life from birth to death. But Harris’s adaptation only comes into its own in the second half. Throughout the first, I wondered what the point was.

Harris, who also directs – bad move – keeps the bones of the story: a noble widow secretly marries her servant and has children by him. She is ruthlessly persecuted for this “sin” against the family name (and fortune) then killed by her brothers; one of them her twin Ferdinand, who then goes mad; the other a Cardinal who also kills his own mistress.

But she ditches Webster’s macabre poetry and shifts the action to roundabout the 1950s – though neither the mannered language nor the setting of her version feels evocative of any particular era. Tom Piper’s set of white metal gantries and grilles looks like something knocked up for a touring production of Prisoner: Cell Block H. The message is that patriarchal violence, often driven by a fear of female agency and desire, is eternal. Ditto, religious hypocrisy.

But man, it’s a mess at the start. Characters are introduced by fuzzy captions, bursts of static and reverberating swamp guitar chords played by a white-clad musician who sometimes strolls through the action.

Harris goes out of her way to make the steward Antonio (Joel Fry) a meek, mousy contrast to his imperious lover, here named Giovanna after the original’s historical source. “’Consummate’, what’s that?” he says after their covert marriage. “F*** each other’s brains out,” she replies.

Hannah Visocchi, Jodie Whittaker, Flor Gandra-Lobina and Matti Houghton in The Duchess [of Malfi] (Marc Brenner)

Rory Fleck Byrne as Ferdinand, meanwhile, is psychotically over the top from the get-go, making explicit the incestuous undertones in Webster. Paul Ready is enjoyably loathsome as the cardinal, propositioning Elizabeth Ayodele’s supplicant Julia when she’s kneeling in prayer. Jude Owusu is impressive as henchman Bosola but lumbered with acres of verbiage.

It all comes together in the horrific, absurd second half where the indomitable Duchess is psychologically tortured in scenes that recall Abu Ghraib abuses. Whittaker exudes battered nobility as she declares Webster’s famous line: “I am the Duchess of Malfi still.”

Later, in an extrapolation of the scene where Antonio hears her voice echoing his words, she leads a line of ghost women who oversee the demise of the men who killed them. The music, intrusive in the first half, becomes a requiem for the dead.

It’s still messy and the bloodbath ending is followed by almost 10 minutes of superfluous wittering. An external director might have curbed some of Harris’s writerly profligacy and evened out the tonal imbalance of the two halves.

But it’s undeniably thrilling to see Whittaker on stage again and remarkable to see an adaptation of a Jacobean tragedy – in the same week as an updated Oedipus – in the West End.