In some ways The Changeling is a simple play told quickly. A young man falls in love with a girl who is betrothed to someone else. She contrives to have her first lover murdered by her father's servant, whom she despises. Hate turns to love, or just passion, and she finally transfers her affections from her second lover to her first's murderer. Such skulduggery will out, and so it does with her, and her murdering lover's, death. Revenge is wreaked on all who deserve it, and we are the wiser for watching the cathartic experience, though this is bought at the price of a high body-count, four in all. 
      But like all Jacobean tragedies there is a deeper significance to this narrative. The Changeling is about being possessed by love. Love draws Alsemero to Beatrice-Joanna. Love draws De Flores to do murder for Beatrice-Joanna, who in turn finally finds her hatred for him turned to love. Corrupt love is played here, and mirrored in the sub-plot where madmen are possessed in bedlam. But in the madhouse there is sometimes less madness than in real life as Antonio's 'change' demonstrates. In Bedlam a celebratory play is being prepared, whose dramatic intention is remarkably similar to the rude mechanicals' play in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Each world reveals the other. 
      Middleton and Rowley's language is not as complex as Shakespeare's and there are fewer word-plays and hinted implications. However there are enough to justify some regulated pace, and this the performance by the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory lacked for much of the time. The acting and speaking of the lines was sometimes so fast that subtleties were lost. In the Pit's small space the loud and unrhythmic declamation was too loud and too clipped. A whisper is audible in the Pit, but there was precious little whispering. 
      The pity of this was that the play seemed two-dimensional. The clever asides that create a covert intimacy with the audience were too quick for the vocal transitions, if any, to register. Saskia Portway's Beatrice-Joanna was unconvincing in her fickleness She seemed to hystrerical throughout, instead of being quietly changed from betrothed to murderous accomplice. Is she evil or possessed by evil? In the end you couldn't tell. 
      Better was the gradual insinuation of Matthew Thomas's De Flores. His symbolically two-faced make-up and amatory engineering were well caught though it was hard to be persuaded his efforts were not wasted on Beatrice-Joanna. Love, I supposed is blind, but here is seemed deaf as well. 
      Roland Oliver's Vermandero had a more confident and regulated stage-presence but the character is not in the front line of any of the actions to the extent Beatrice or De Flores are. 
      The comic scenes in Bedlam were better. David Collins's Alibius was suitably lecherous, greedy and pettifogging, and ripe for the excellent machinations of Lollio's guile. Isabella's two 'suitors' were marvellously played by Jamie Ballard as Antonio (the eponymous hero) and Gyuri Sarossy as Franciscus. Here the play took off, and the exaggeration of the suits, which their hyperbolic language, seemed apt to text and production. The production is worth seeing for these scenes. 
      Though Andrew Hilton's direction of The Changeling shouldn't be missed and Dominic Power's re-arrangement of, and additions to, the text work, one can easily envisage a performance of the play that is more sutble, more menacing and psychologically richer. The discourse between the corruption of high life and the goings-in Bedlam could be better matched. The Pit would be the perfect venue for this, as the play's great stream of asides lends itself to just that intimacy that they need.
Roderick Swanston