TV REVIEWS : Serpentine Hoskins in ‘The Changeling’

Noble romantic stirrings and the ideal of courtly love come down to pure lust in the rarely staged post-Elizabethan tragedy “The Changeling.”

Seething and simmering through smoky, murky passageways in a Spanish castle tremulous with repressed tension, the BBC production throws co-stars Bob Hoskins and Elizabeth McGovern into a viper’s nest of sex, shame and murder.

On one level it’s a soap opera told through a very clouded glass. But playwrights Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, who penned this play in 1622, touch a psychological pulse that transcends melodrama and provides Hoskins and McGovern with an operatic tour de force.

Although the minor playwrights’ uneven verse is not remotely Shakespearean, you can’t help but feel the ghosts of “Macbeth” and “Othello” (written just a few years earlier than this play).

Lust hovers in the dank and dark chambers, exchanged in whispery liaisons most poisonous between a repressed, peevish mistress (McGovern) and her lurking, sex-crazed servant, his face despoiled by a horrible birthmark (Hoskins).

“These foul chops may come into favor someday,” the servant pines in one of the show’s numerous interior monologues.

Suddenly, opportunity strikes.

In collusion with his nefarious but naive lady, he commits murders for her and, in return, brushing aside her offer of gold, demands she submit to him--which she does. The production’s ripest achievement is the sexually cloistered McGovern’s unexpected and growing attraction to the serpent in her life.

In the play’s best line, McGovern, all curls and heaving bosom, chillingly intones, “Vengeance begins. Murder, I see, is followed by more sins.”

Having been lured by the drama’s teeming lust and psychological truth, a word of deep caution: Adapter Michael Hasting cut out the entire comic subplot, which is set in a mad house and counterpoints the play’s theme while underscoring the meaning of the title, which otherwise makes no sense (not to be confused with the old George C. Scott movie about a ghost, “The Changeling”).

More detrimentally, director Simon Curtis opens up with a scene that’s a certified disaster when it comes to grabbing viewers. Staged between two courtiers, the first moments are so stilted and incomprehensible in their stagy speech patterns they’re certain to send viewers spinning off to other channels.

But patience is rewarded. Passions are so willful and tantalizing the production gathers steam even as you lean forward to untangle the verbal cadences. Don’t worry if you miss some of the words--it makes no difference.

The bloody payoff, when McGovern and Hoskins are most full of life, breathes air into their sin. Throughout, Hoskins--a veritable satyr--is terrific. * “The Changeling” premieres today on the Bravo Channel at 5 p.m. and again at 9:30 p.m.