Blood. Torture. Incest. John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is not a sight for the weak-hearted, and has indeed been the centre of much controversy since its first performance in the seventeenth century. It would be easy to perform as a one-dimensional exploration of the consequences of sin; more difficult to capture all the nuances of human frailty and compassion, repentance and – dare I say it – love. Thankfully, Donnellan’s production at the Cambridge Arts Theatre is a masterpiece that achieves all of this and more. 

From the word go, Eve Ponsonby (Annabella) shines with a vitality that is infectious. She does not simply own the stage; she makes it come alive and revolve around her. Having a heroine who is so self-consciously attention-seeking can be a risk in terms of playing down the other characters, but here Ponsonby seems instead to imbue the rest of the cast with her energy and remarkable talent.

The sleek professionalism of the choreography gives the whole thing a fast, exhilarating pace, whilst the clear delivery ensures that the audience never loses track of Ford’s meaning. The modernised setting is a gamble given the very of-its-time ‘father marrying off his daughter’ plot, but the cast’s theatrical pace and movement gives the stage a kind of magic realism which excuses its somewhat phantasmagorical collision of old and new, theatrical and realistic.

On the matter of incest… this can be a difficult topic to negotiate. How are we to feel sympathy for protagonists who commit this greatest of social taboos? The edits and omissions from the original text are subtle but necessary, effectively painting the whole thing as a lusty mistake perpetrated by a madman who is distinctly Hamlet-esque: Giovanni (Orlando James) is a passionate, earnest young man whose very first spoken word reveals his mental state – ‘lost’. James's polished performance is a veritable crescendo of accuracy and traces the emergence of a distinct identity, culminating in a final scene which is as shocking as it is poignant; the climax of a young man driven mad by his carnal longing.

Carnality is, indeed, a dominant theme throughout: it seems no character is free from sexual desire and bloodlust, forcing the audience to question what it truly means to be human in a world where pursuit of gratification is the only constant, carrying with it profound fear of the afterlife. If the production can be criticised on any terms, it is that at times the gore and sexuality become almost farcical in their intensity: the audience is not quite sure whether a certain death is supposed to be tragic, comedic or a perverse mixture of the two. But this, perhaps, is the intended meaning of the play – the curious blurring of the boundaries between morbid fascination and actual sin, the spectacle of pain versus horror, the temptation of incest pitched against its repercussions.

Full of shocks and surprises, this is an ingenious production which leaves the audience perturbed and confused – torn between compassion and disgust – but also, undeniably, hungering for more.