Stage review: Love/Intrigue, Southwark Playhouse

The thunderous cavern of the Southwark Playhouse is an appropriately portentous setting for the murky doings in the strife-torn court of a German duke.

It is for the love of commoner Louisa that Chancellor's son Ferdinand is prepared to threaten his father's royal patronage by ducking a more advantageous match to Lady Milford.

Such high stakes do not generally inspire a spirit of low-key familial compromise and the scene is set for the rending of heart and obligation.

Curiously, in the service of a tragedy built upon misunderstandings, little is left unsaid in an ambitious production by Faction Theatre Company.

But Cerith Flinn's touching Ferdinand cuts through with a raw simplicity that is honest and affecting. Alice Henley wrestles inconsistently with the demands of the heroine (who hopscotches between dutiful shame and feisty rebellion) while acting honours go to Danny Miller as foot-in-mouth music man Mr Millar, Gareth Fordred, as the oleaginous Worm and Kate Sawyer as mad-for-it Lady Milford.

The staging of Frederich Schiller's classic 1784 play is deft in a minimalist space. Chairs become chess pieces while the white facepaint of the baddies smears like corruption or fades to suggest the restoration of virtue.

The writing (completed in a fortnight by Faction) too frequently betrays its roots in a German-English dictionary.

Lumpen cliches ("nothing ventured, nothing gained") and word-for-word translations ("leap over the boundaries of your sex") are needlessly flabby while the tension between the formal vernacular and clunky street slang ("pimp out your face") is only ever resolved in the moments of high drama when only the lexicography of melodrama matches the moment.

Ultimately, though, this shouty but sincere production makes an earnest attempt to capture the anguish of love caught in the cogs of political power and the players sufficiently ramp up the tension to convey the agony of inevitable doom.

– From August 2010