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1984glasgow

'This was a conventional production, intellectually speaking. Prowse offered the "Toussand Laureate" and reworked the central section of his Glasgow Citizens trilogy (Painter's Palace of Pleasure) to do so. The same monumental slabs dominated action, but on Greenwich's open stage they rotated more frequently; parting to create deep gloomy alleys or alarming naked spaces across which cowled figures scuttled; slamming together to cramp the action in downstage corners and genuinely threatening to crush the actors unless they moved to the rhythms their environment was dictating. Incense floated, blood soaked into stone [...] The lighting took in guttering candles, gigantic shadows and abnormal brilliance. Characters were visually simplified into one pattern: slick dark hair, whey faces, bodies that were elongated and then remodelled by tight, bunched silks. The voices were generally thin, best at snapping out single phrases of venom and disappointment. Sensationalism was hardly skirted [...] but this was a White Devil which gripped the attention throughout and justified Vittoria's "This place is hell".

[T]his White Devil was more than a study of two problematic individuals. Rather, it became a composite exploration of self-destruction and the costs of survival. 

The real achievement of the production was an architectonic one, however; and [...] it may affect the way directors - and possibly readers - approach the play [...] The [final] image was of beings trapped and limited by their emotions, locked in a wretched state from which they could not escape now, but forced to watch the consequence of their actions on a rapidly-collapsing world. In this production only politicians survived.'

Tony Howard, RORD 27 (1984), 141-2