BWW Reviews: WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN, National Theatre, May 6 2010

Benny Hill was one of Britain's most successful comedy exports, his sketch shows garnering huge television ratings worldwide in the 70s and 80s. Hill's formula was a canny combination of double entendres and ill-suited matches between young girls and older men, all done with a childish, but perceptible cruelty that appealed to its audiences' atavistic emotions.

All those elements, enhanced by the power of drama, are present in Marianne Elliot's sumptuous staging of Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women (at the National Theatre until 4 July). The play charts the fates of two innocent young women, Bianca and Isabella, who are corrupted by the men who use them to satiate their lust for sex and power and by their own inability to see the risks they run in failing to resist The Temptations of material wealth and romantic love. At the centre of this danse macabre sits Livia, the scheming older woman, who manipulates younger, weaker individuals until even she is brought low by her hubristic desires. As the tragedy unfolds, there are plenty of laughs from Bennyhillesque wordplay, confusions and misunderstandings, only somewhat tempered by Middleton's shameless embrace of the nastiness that underpins humour.

In a cast who stay just the right side of hamming (though Richard Lintern as the amoral Duke came dangerously close to twirling his moustache with villainous intent), Harriet Walter is dazzling as Livia (reminding this reviewer of Sian Phillips' portrayal of an equally evil namesake in the BBC's "I, Claudius") and Harry Melling and Nick Blood wonderfully winning as a kind of brainless Ant and Dec catapulted into the Florentine Court. The increasingly disturbing events play out against Lez Brotherston's fascistic set and are beautifully complemented by Olly Fox's music.

Nearly 400 years on from its first staging, Middleton's writing is as scalpel sharp as it ever was, his dissection of human weaknesses speaking as clearly to the iPhone audience as to its Jacobean forebears. Such is the power of High Art, even when seasoned with low comedy.  

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