SOURCE: Review of The Broken Heart, in Financial Times, 7 June 1995, p. 19.

[In the following review, Murray commends Michael Boyd's production of The Broken Heart, asserting that "the serious work has all gone into the characters and the elaborate, darkly ironical verse which has to establish them and make the play. "]

Seen last year at the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford. John Ford's The Broken Heart comes to the Barbican trailing gore and glory. Not that it is a play about war—on the contrary, its concerns are marital and familial; but its emotions are as grim and destructive as anywhere in Racine.

Ford's only half-familiar play is 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (which used never to be played on account of its title, but is nowadays played partly because of it); the National Theatre botched it a few years ago, with a puppy actor as the incestuously driven brother. With Iain Glen as the hero of The Broken Heart, Michael Boyd's production gives us the real Ford. It looks simple; the serious work has all gone into the characters and the elaborate, darkly ironical verse which has to establish them and make the play.

More like Racine than Shakespeare, The Broken Heart begins with a disastrous situation already fixed, and what we are to see are the workings-out. Ithocles, the young Spartan Prince, has already married off his sister to Lord Bassanes, though she and Orgilus (Glen) had made a love match; Orgilus is already steaming with fury and despair, and needs only the springs of other people's romantic attachments to wind them up and bring them all down. The blood is saved up for the last act, when suddenly there is a lot of it (that typical Jacobean device, a horridly cunning mechanism, figures prominently).

Glen has matured fast, and is superb with Orgilus's unstaunchable bitterness. Fully equal to the verse, which demands searching intelligence, he is vocally a model of eloquent variety—passion, sarcasm, obsequiousness and cold murderous glee. His lost Penthea is Emma Fielding, whose fine, ruined energy is so impressive that one hesitates to mention the one thing she loses: she puts her all into every moment, whereas in the later stages of the play a part of her ought to be somewhere else, remote and unreachable. We could believe bloody revenge from her, but not quite wilful self-starvation.

Among the other players, all boasting as much vivid expertise, Robert Bowman's Ithocles grows saintly in his eventual martyrdom, and William Houston is sturdily touching as his lieutenant. Philip Voss's madly jealous Bassanes has an interesting campy edge, and the other principal women, Elaine Pike and Olivia Williams, play up beautifully. There is a good, unscrupulous Scottish chaperone from Doreen Hepburn, almost the only rude, downto-earth character here among the extravagant plotting and the agonised laments.

Melancholy, period-coloured music by Craig Armstrong sets the grievous tone with perfect tact. In timing and blocking, Boyd finds a lucid shape for the play (no mean task). We discover that The Broken Heart is actually a minor national treasure; an opportunity to find that out is so rare that this one should not be missed.