BBC adapatation - 1980

The text was adapted by Joffé, producer Richard Broke and Kenneth McLeish, known for his effective translations of Greek dramas. Elements of the language throughout were updated (‘gallants’ becomes ‘fellows”, ‘Call me not dear’ becomes ‘I am not your dear’), while what is perhaps the most egregious substitution attracted the critical wrath of Andrew Sinclair writing in The Listener,

Ford’s good line, ‘Oh, ignorance in knowledge!’ was removed for [Alexander] Pope’s most notorious one, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’… Texts are not sacred but they may be respected. Otherwise all the splendour of what is seen may be overwhelmed by anger at what is misheard.’ (‘The enemy within’, 22 May 1980, p. 662)

‘The most extensive interventions are made to the final act of the play,’ Martin White notes, ‘many designed to smooth out the shifts in Ford’s text that can present some difficulty in tracking the link between the characters’ words and actions.’ (John Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 130) While some additions may jar, the overall effect is to create a fast-paced and largely credible period drama, which at many points allows Ford’s language to make a considerable impact. See, for example, the whispered attack of Alison Fiske’s glorious Hippolita on Soranzo (Anthony Bate) from Act II Scene 2.

Joffé and his colleagues transposed the play from Renaissance Parma to a northern country house in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Filming in fact took place at Chastleton House, a Jacobean wool-merchant’s estate built in the early seventeenth century, and where James MacTaggart had shot The Duchess of Malfi eight years before. The all-important urban context of the original is lost, as is much of the religious and intellectual context (it is arguable, for example, that for Ford, Giovanni’s embrace of incest is as much an intellectual challenge as it is driven by the passions).

The setting is that of a prosperous, agrarian bourgeoisie and the corruption of the society around the lovers becomes primarily financial. Martin White identifies how

Putana’s altered lines emphasized the priorities of this mercantile society where there is ‘bargaining, talking, dealing on every side’ rather than Ford’s ‘threatening, challenging, quarrelling and fighting’. (John Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 129)

‘Tis Pity… was filmed during the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government, and the production is an effective if oblique riposte to the ‘Victorian values’ about the Prime Minister was so enthusiastic.

Filming in a contained world like Chastleton has practical advantages, given that urban exteriors do not need to be dressed in period, but the house also offered Joffé numerous opportunities to conjure up a claustrophobic world in which supposedly secret conversations can be overheard. Note how many scenes (including the first passionate kiss of the lovers) are shot as if being observed through doorways, and like James Taggart for Malfi, Joffé uses Chastleton’s staircases to suggest a world lacking all stability. There are other felicities of staging also, as when Giovanni declares his love to Anabella in what appears to have been their nursery, with that potent symbol of innocence, a rocking-horse, prominent in the establishing shot.

The escalating brutality of the play’s actions is observed dispassionately by the somewhat distanced camerawork of Nat Crosby, who shoots with muted colours and a style that echoes the social realism of The Spongers and other films from producer Tony Garnett set in contemporary Britain. By the end the affair Giovanni and Anabella may not have brought about the collapse of an urban polity and the takeover of Parma by the Cardinal, but the vicious authoritarianism of Soranzo triumphs and the household and estate of the good-hearted Florio is erased. The world is harsh and pitiless, whether the time and the place are those of late sixteenth-century Italy, of mid Victorian England or of the country in which the television audience was watching in May 1980.