Women Beware Women

Theatre students in English and Cultural Studies at UWA present contemporary English playwright Howard Barker’s rewriting of Thomas Middleton’s early-1620s Jacobean revenge tragedy Women Beware Women. Middleton’s play was last performed at UWA in the Octagon Theatre in 1982, directed by the then director-in-residence Timothy West with a cast comprising English Department staff and members of the UWA Grads and student theatre communities. This radical reworking utilises most of the first four acts and language of Middleton’s play in its first half, with a second half comprised of Barker’s mixture of vividly poetic and robust vernacular language that takes the trajectories of the protagonists towards a denouement which leaves most of the characters surviving, but which shatters the ducal state of greed, misogyny, and moral corruption – a denouement which Middleton saw fit to end with a conventional revenge tragedy massacre of his troublesome protagonists. Suitable for audiences 15+. Tickets at Dolphin door.