Skull Beneath the Skin

The White Devil, by John Webster. It was Shakespeare's destiny to dwarf his playwriting contemporaries, which by no means makes them dwarfs. Webster, best known for The Duchess of Malfi, was a splendid poet who mixed beauty with horror. If he spilled too much blood on stage, he also drenched the boards with passion. The decisive motion in The White Devil is a plunging dagger, but its determining mood is an obsessive sense of evil. In an admirable off-Broadway revival in modern dress, the play leaps the centuries with ease--it is galvanically alive.

Webster's hero-villain is a spleeny young opportunist named Flamineo. He is secretary to the Duke of Brachiano. To better himself, he plots the murder of the duke's wife and his own sister's husband, thus clearing the way for his sister to marry the duke. When his brother becomes squeamish about this short cut to success at court, Flamineo kills him, driving his mother mad. In Act II, Operation Avenger, the duke, his new wife and Flamineo are, in turn, killed.

This rapid pileup of corpses does not entirely evade the risk of becoming farce, a kind of Marx Brothers tragedy. But whenever the villainy threatens to become laughable, an authoritatively able cast keeps the drama under sobering control. Frank Langella makes Flamineo a smilingly, itchingly venomous blood brother to lago, and Carrie Nye and Eric Berry are absorbingly effective as the duke's second wife and a corrupt cardinal. Director Jack Landau has given the play drive and fury by cutting garrulous speeches and eliminating intrusive ghosts.

In The White Devil, evil wears its proper guise, disguise--and deceit. The sinister masquerades as the pious. Murderers dress as monks. Treachery promotes itself as loyalty. Love is feigned, so is madness, even death. The last deceit--self-deceit--is stripped away in Flamineo's final speech when he sees life as he has lived it: the consummate cheat, the ultimate vanity, the supreme counterfeit. At that moment, The White Devil becomes a tragedy of more than blood.

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