The Duchess [of Malfi] review – Jodie Whittaker trapped in Tarantinoesque revenge tragedy

Spirited … Jodie Whittaker in The Duchess [of Malfi] at Trafalgar theatre. Photograph: Marc Brenner

John Webster’s revenge tragedy contains a terrible timelessness. To modernise this story of a woman who refuses to be submissive and is killed by her brothers for it is to highlight the eternal relevance of male domestic violence, even against a figure as powerful as Webster’s wealthy duchess.

Zinnie Harris’s updated version from 2019, taking place in an indistinct present with swearing and sex alongside some 17th-century formalities, makes hard-hitting points on the sociopathic reasoning for murderous misogyny. But it is too much of a melange of tone and ideas. Jodie Whittaker, returning to the stage after more than a decade’s absence, gives a spirited leading performance but is hamstrung by the strangeness of Harris’s own production.

Is this a Tarantinoesque take on Jacobean drama or more straight-faced than that? It seems like a bit of both. There is a filmic quality with buzzing music and characters’ names projected on to a white backdrop, along with slick, stylised brutality. The Duchess’s brothers, Ferdinand (Rory Fleck Byrne) and the Cardinal (Paul Ready, fantastically evil), have the thuggish quality of mobsters. But these elements flatten the emotional shocks in the tragedy.

The occasional songs have soulful, earnest tones that do not quite cohere with the Tarantino energy. There is a number by Whittaker (beautiful) and, later, by the Cardinal’s lover, Julia (Elizabeth Ayodele), that could be reflective monologues, set to music, but it becomes cornier with the arrival of a singer (an angel?) dressed in white.

The intersections of wealth and gender are well highlighted in the first half, when the duchess, like her brothers, is very aware of her power and enjoys exerting it over her steward turned secret husband, Antonio (Joel Fry, servile and bumbling, though charmingly so). The servants are aware of their powerlessness, some using it as a way to excuse their actions – especially Bosola (Jude Owusu). Misogyny is unpicked through his character rather thumpingly and you feel no sense of his inner journey.

Harris’s script abounds with exposition, with characters explaining themselves. (“I am not her equal,” says Antonio of the Duchess. “I’m impulsive and headstrong,” says the Duchess, and on.) The brothers are baroque, and flatly symbolic. Ferdinand is eaten up by incestuous desire, aiming a knife at his sister’s vagina.

Tom Piper, who designed the original show at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, is back with a white industrial set that has a gantry, allowing for eavesdropping and spying from above, while Ben Ormerod’s lighting is full of shadow play. During the duchess’s torture, the stage turns into a kind of Room 101, with graphically violent images projected. Whittaker plays the duchess’s defiance in death strongly, remaining empowered into the afterlife – as does her maid – and assuming an active role in the downfall of her brothers.

The performances are powerful but the setup feels so overbearingly orchestrated that you do not feel the characters’ passion or anger. For all its good ideas, perhaps there are too many of them. It seems ultimately like auteur overload.

• At Trafalgar theatre, London, until 20 December