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Review of The Cenci Performed at the People's Theatre, Newcastle

A few patrons of the arts in the North-East were fortunate enough to see Shelley's rarely performed play The Cenci between 22-26 May staged at the People's Theatre in Newcastle. However, they may have left, like I did, feeling somewhat ambivalent about their experience. In short, it was a good amateur production, if not altogether satisfactory for that. My ambivalence watches the play's historical reception. For a piece that doubtless represents Shelley's strongest bid to receive public acclamation, his success was at best limited. It was, on the one hand, the only one of Shelley's published works to have gone into a second edition during his lifetime; on the other hand, despite the fact that the poet toned down the uglier aspects of the play's historical events, it was banned from public performance until its presentation before The Shelley Society in 1886,which contained such literary luminaries as Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. This recent viewing leads one to wonder whether its initial censorship may not have been a blessing in disguise. Censorship can add allure to a work of art, bringing a sense of intrigue that excites the public's curiosity, particularly that of its avant-garde. It may have worked so with critics, who in recent years have interpreted the play variously as an example of Shelley's anti-authoritarianism, as a prophesy of incipient Italian nationalism or, more straightforwardly, as an attack on organised religion. Yet attention to the play's relative lack of attention need not necessarily act as a corrective to a work's obscurity. So it is with this play. For while The Cenci is doubtless a dramatic work, it maintains a sense characteristic of Shelley's writing of being a vehicle for generic, amoral ideas firmly resistant to the particular conventions of genre. In this play, it expresses itself in characters who would attract our sympathies through their suffering were it but for the fact that they work to lose it through their own questionable words and deeds. Thus while we are presented with a landscape of social decrepitude, we remain without a hint of moral authority to pronounce it decrepit not even a chorus to provide social commentary. The effect of such a practice seems to be this: the very fact that, as Shelley explained to Peacock, the play was effectively written in order to defy 'any courtesy of