The Duchess of Malfi: She's really gotta have it...

It's the part all discerning actresses want. Daniel Rosenthal on the lure of the Duchess of Malfi

Peggy Ashcroft was so fond of The Duchess of Malfi that she played the tragic title role twice, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1945 and for the RSC at the Aldwych in 1960. Since then, John Webster's greatest play has consistently attracted some of the finest actresses of each successive generation: Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins (for BBC television), Jane Lapotaire, Helen Mirren, Eleanor Bron, Janet Suzman, Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson and now, directed by Phyllida Lloyd at the National, Janet McTeer. Shakespeare's plays aside, no other Jacobean tragedy can boast such a star-studded post-War performance history. So what makes all these performers, not to mention A-list directors like Lloyd and Adrian Noble, so mad about the duchess?

The answer does not lie in Webster's plot, which is freely adapted from events in the life of the real duchess (born Giovanna d'Aragona in 1478), and from earlier prose and verse accounts of her story. Webster shows the recently widowed heroine defying her brothers, Duke Ferdinand (her twin) and the cardinal, by falling in love with and marrying her steward, Antonio. The couple have three children in rapid succession and enjoy a brief, secretive spell of domestic bliss before the family is destroyed by the duchess's irredeemably corrupt siblings and their chief henchman, Bosola, the play's malcontent. Their scheming leads to a climactic round of poisoning and stabbing that resembles the "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts ... accidental judgments, casual slaughters" of Hamlet and the gory finales of the two other Jacobean revenge dramas revived most frequently by our subsidised companies: Webster's The White Devil (first staged two years before The Duchess's first outing, which was at the Globe in 1614) and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (1623).

Read or see the play after reading this synopsis, however, and you realise that it's the duchess's extraordinary journey along a comparatively conventional storyline, and her life-changing effect on the four male principals, that make the play stand out. Webster endows his heroine with so many roles – duchess, passionate lover and wife, doting mother, disobedient sister, devout Catholic, tormented prisoner – that after her first attempt at the part Ashcroft wrote: "I love it so much that I can never do it justice."

Back on stage for the first time since winning a Tony for her 1997 performance as Nora in A Doll's House, Janet McTeer notes: "So often with female Jacobean roles, you're either pure and marvellous, or you're a hoyden – and it's not very interesting to play either. Part of the attraction for me is that in the midst of this cold, hard and calculating court the duchess somehow remains a really normal, gorgeous, lovely, warm person. It's a grown-up part and I'm incredibly lucky, having played all the girls' roles, to be playing a grown-up, which is what I am."

Adrian Noble – who made his name as a director in 1980 with an acclaimed Malfi at the Manchester Royal Exchange, starring Helen Mirren as the duchess and Bob Hoskins as Bosola – agrees. "It is an unusually multi-layered part for the Jacobeans. It needs an actress who can a) fulfill a terrifically ripe sexuality on stage, b) convince as a real mum, because without that quality the middle [domestic] section of the play falls apart completely, and c) can then cope with the big tragic scenes. There aren't many actresses who can do all three. Quite a lot can do two. Helen Mirren can do all three in a consummate way." On the evidence of her work in Ibsen, Chekhov and Shakespeare, so, too, can McTeer. For Phyllida Lloyd, who has loved the play since she was at school, the poetry Webster wrote for the duchess, particularly in her scenes with Antonio, is "full of humour, compassion, wit, a gentleness of spirit. When people think of Webster they think of skulls, murder and madness but actually the writing for the duchess is very gentle, alive and contemporary." After the duchess's homely idyll is replaced by hellish incarceration, Lloyd adds, "she gradually discovers a kind of courage and steadfastness. One of the things people find exciting and remarkable about the play is watching this person facing oblivion with great imagination. Like one reads of people in Auschwitz who faced terror with a kind of inner strength that inspired those around them."

Yet alongside their admiration for the part, Lloyd and Noble harbour reservations about the structure and pacing of a play that Webster is thought to have revised at least a dozen times. "Before we started rehearsing, many colleagues told me The Duchess was a directors' graveyard," says Lloyd. "After Trevor Nunn spoke to me about doing the play at the National, I noticed that for all his protestations of its greatness he had never actually directed it himself. I thought that was a bit of a warning sign, but I am fatally attracted to plays of uneven structure.

"The main problem is that the script contains an enormous amount of material, not all of which I'd say is pure Webster. There are a lot of traps, such as dumb shows and dances and songs, including one that has a note in the text from Webster saying 'the author disclaims this ditty as his'. That makes you think 'Gosh, what else is in the play is not the author's?'" Noble identified these and other pitfalls during rehearsals for his Manchester production, and believes that he only avoided them "by re-shaping the play quite heavily, moving scenes around and shredding people's parts, right up until the dress rehearsal. The play contains some of the greatest Jacobean poetry, but there's sometimes a linguistic self-indulgence to Webster that can be profitably edited." Lloyd, too, has pruned the text, and if her Lyttelton staging cuts a clear path through what she calls "the structural muddle", and McTeer responds to the role as sensitively as she did to Ibsen's Nora, then audiences may well leave the National agreeing with the judgment of the late Cambridge scholar George Rylands. Having played the duchess in an all-male undergraduate production in 1924 and then directed Ashcroft at the Haymarket in 1945, Rylands concluded that The Duchess of Malfi was "as great a tragedy as any outside Shakespeare."

'The Duchess of Malfi': NT Lyttelton, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), now previewing, opens 28 January to 10 March; then tours. More details at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk