“Oh, come not near me, sir; I shall defile you… ’Tis time to die when ‘tis a shame to live.”
Brooksby Melton College and The BMC Green Room present an original interpretation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s Jacobean classic, The Changeling.
Sunday 20 May 2018, 7:30pm in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
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In a world of black and white, the young Beatrice-Joanna and Alsemero fall helplessly in love. Unfortunately, she has already been promised to Alonzo. Beatrice’s solution is simple… employ her mother’s disfigured and obsessed servant Deflores to murder her fiancé. Unfortunately, there is a miscommunication about the price, and when Deflores comes to claim her prize it is not gold that she desires, but Beatrice herself.
Meanwhile, the hopelessly jealous doctor Alibius has imprisoned his young wife Isabella in the asylum in order to protect her from straying into the arms of another man. Foolishly, he entrusts her care to Lollio (his depraved servant) and fails to realise the severity and danger of her predicament.
The fallout from both plots is explosive and the characters quickly descend into the very depths of their immorality and sanity. Complete with murder, lunacy, mistaken identities, fire, ghosts, lust and violence, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling is regarded as one of the greatest, highly-charged and psychological of Jacobean tragedies.