“The Changeling” at the Young Vic

It was our first time seeing a play at the Young Vic. When we arrived it was immediately clear that the theatre’s name informs the environment: our surroundings felt alarmingly “hip” with its huge bar, loud rock music and minimalist theatre space. We’re more accustomed to traditional (stodgy) theatres in the West End so it was good to mix it up a bit.

Since moving to London, Jacobean drama has emerged as my favorite period in English theatre history. I fell in love with Thomas M’s writing when I saw “The Revenger’s Tragedy” at the NT back in the summer of ’08, a performance which sparked my voracious hunger for Jacobean plays. “Voracious” and “hunger” are highly-appropriate words to use when writing about the theatre that came out of England in the early-17th-century. Much of it is sordid, dark, chaotic, extreme and tragic – I’ve reasoned my love for Jacobean drama by deciding the experience of watching a Thomas M play must function as some sort of deeply-cathartic Freudian release in my otherwise quite staid and law-abiding existence.

“The Changeling” did not disappoint. As in the NT’s production of “The Revenger’s Tragedy”, the cast kept to every word of Thomas M’s play; however, the dress was modern, music contemporary and even the dance choreography a la Beyonce. To top it all off, the director uses mainstream food products as props in the play’s most violent scenes.

What I love most about Jacobean theatre (and Shakespeare’s canon) is the play on language, the use of double entendres which serve as a double paradoxical function: to honour a young maiden yet objectify her, to agree with the man of the house yet laugh at his shortcomings. I left the Young Vic happy yet exhausted from the onslaught of language that is watching a Thomas M play straight through without an intermission. Also, I will never look at jello the same way again.