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Ben Jonson’s comedies, conceived in the crabbed spirit of Roman satire, can be difficult for modern audiences. Largely lacking the lyricism of Shakespeare, and filled with the now-obscure allusions to urban society that came naturally to a lifelong Londoner who was a bricklayer and repeat-offender felon as well as an actor and playwright, they have not aged as well as the more abstract fantasies of his contemporary from Stratford. It is a tribute to the current Blackfriars production of The Devil is an Ass, Jonson’s 1616 assault on greed and folly, that it bridges the distance between his time and ours with an intelligibly funny play.
Susan Heyward turns idle hands into the devil’s playthings during The Devil is an Ass, at Blackfriars Playhouse.
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Part of the company’s third “Actors’ Renaissance Season” using Jacobean theatrical techniques, this Devil impresses less by any apparent lack of “directors, designers, and months of group rehearsals” than by the trademark Blackfriars clarity of action and diction, aided by judicious cuts of Jonson’s most impenetrable topicalities. The devil of the title is Pug (acted by the versatile and athletic Susan Heyward), an ambitious junior fiend based on stock figures of medieval religious drama. Sent from hell to vex Londoners, he attaches himself as manservant to the dupe Fitzdottrel, a social-climbing skinflint who all but sells his wife’s virtue for a cloak and his lands for an illusory chance at a dukedom. Christopher Seiler’s appropriately broad realization of this latter role is balanced by the smooth swindler Meerecraft, to whom actor John Harrell—in the production’s subtlest performance—gives a winning plausibility. Several well-acted subsidiary characters, ranging from a shady businesswoman to a tight-fisted City jeweler, serve to complicate an imbroglio of fraud and counter-fraud that leaves Pug gasping at the superior wickedness of mankind. “The devil is an ass” by comparison, he concludes. “All my days in hell were holidays to this!”
Like other ASC productions, this Blackfriars experience includes the now-familiar authenticities of transsexual and doubled casting, ambient lighting, refreshments hawked from the stage, and “music” (to describe it generously) performed by the cast during intermissions. The equally-authentic theater itself remains a visual and acoustic delight, in some ways the chief attraction of everything produced in it.