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Adam James as Duke Vincentio and Isis Hainsworth as Isabella. Pictures: Helen Murray Measure for Measure The Royal Shakespeare Company Stratford-upon-Avon ***** Staging Shakespeare in Modern Dress, rather than mock-Elizabethan fancy-outfits or Jacobean bloomers, is by no means merely a kind of modern fad. It was pretty common practice in the 19th century, and even more so in the 18th (Restoration Play era); while extraordinary, elaborate sets, weird creatures, flying machines etc. were surely the norm in the excitement-gagging, bizarre, magical devices-era of the 17th. So the preference of this Measure for Measure team, Director Emily Burns – who staged the RSC’s recently acclaimed, memorably successful and enticing Love’s Labour’ Lost – and her Set and Costume Designer Frankie Bradshaw, to transfer Shakespeare’s piercing, telling morality play, dating (with cause?) from the first year of James I’s accession, to a compelling, riveting modern look, while it might have been some kind of gamble, proved successful in every way. We were grabbed from the start, and this production and splendidly marshalled cast never looked back. In a sense the set was the first star. It seemed to deploy large, even massive, sections of the RSC’s stage machinery. Heavy lit ceilings that rose and fell, suggestive almost of strong authority and control. Green leather-clad seats dotted all round as if declarations of inferiority. Most vividly, a paper-piled desk, kind of unyielding aluminum albeit not tubular, which rose from the undercroft and sank almost as ominously, at which – the Duke having taken his planned absence – Angelo, the villain of the piece, the Iago if you like, presided, dishing out penalties and proclaiming undue crimes, bossy, smug, presumptuous, unyielding, brutal, sat, like some Wall Street Wolf, vicious, vengeful, domineering, abusing responsibility, proving his superiority by dreadfulness. If corruption means per se the unforgiveable malpractice on Angelo’s part, it is the implicit hypocrisy that must beam out: Shakespeare might give us a list, a welter, an endless cluster of the Duke’s deputy’s vileness, but it is his unreliable promise to exonerate the heroine’s – Isabella’s - appallingly condemned brother (Oli Higginson, a gently unresisting but sympathetic Claudio) that matters, and is the stuff of the play.
Isis Hainsworth as Isabella and Tom Mothersdale as Angelo In fact there were lesser roles – Simon Pritchard’s amiable, puzzled but loyal adviser Escalus, the energetic, businesslike Miya James (Angelo’s scuttlingly efficient aide), Natasha Jayetileke (Provost – a prison official turned with admirable competence into a proficient male figure) and even the distinguished Cardinal to whose robes Valentine Hanson brought dignity and handsome authority.- who each leant clarity and character, rendering Burns’s always pertinent production an impresssive example of well-structured RSC teamwork. The two principal girl roles are, of course, essential to the plot. Isabella is to large extent one of Shakespeare’s innocents – if not a Cordelia, or conversely a Beatrice or Portia, more in the line of a Celia, Miranda or Imogen. Despite a very curious, somewhat shabby-looking outfit, the point of which was difficult to grasp, Isis Hainsworth delivered those touching speeches – she has several - with tenderness though perhaps an undue restraint. But when Mariana, a much smaller role, is roped in to play the trick on Angelo, deceiving him into believing he is seducing Isabella when he’s not, things certainly hotted up. Her speaking was a model of perfection, and assurance, her gutsy presence and personality, loudly (actually fabulously) attired, a big person, stock full of assurance, a forceful, personality, geared up for a (vitally important) game.
Two of the cleverest structural touches – and they were both inspired – were the very end of part one, where to a brilliant, awesomely sudden explosion of lighting (Joshua Pharo) Angelo is (very graphically) seduced, orgasmically, sex oozing, by the imagined Isabella, the sensational lights cut despatching the audience in fascinated amazement; the other, the highly intelligent idea of devoting the whole of part two to the (substantial) Act 5 (with a modicum of Act 4) to make up the second half. Measure for Measure is, arguably, one of Shakespeare’s wordier plays, closer to some of his contemporaries like Ford or Webster, and the RSC has elected recently to make quite substantial cuts where it conceives they will help. It certainly worked handsomely here: the risk generally works. The impact is to bring the principal plot to the fore, reduce or modify the ancilliary scenes, and make the overall outcome more embraceable by an attentive audience. But of course at the heart of the play is the moral contrast between the shrewd, perceptive and profoundly wise disguised Duke, and his grasping, self-interested, and essentially immoral deputy. Despite the curious, perhaps salient decision not to disguise Duke Vincentio’s face, preferring merely to furnish him with a Bishop’s purple vestment, which requires some allowance from audience and cast alike, Adam James supplied such a distinguished, finely spoken, patently intelligent Duke that one accepted the quasi-disguise relatively willingly. Every scene revealed his dignity and perhaps – in a positive sense - cunning. Tom Mothersdale’s Angelo provided us from the start, once he occupies the Ducal desk, with a grim, insalubrious Robespierre, almost idly toying with undesirable documents. The whole point of the play is that he will in the end fall, but he ensures he has a satisfying share of mischief (or worse – vile malefaction) before he is wholly unexpectedly unmasked. Two things that worked fabulously well: one was the photographic enlargements, brilliantly projected from stage level (Kaffe Keating, Katie Singh) which peopled the upper stage with glaring placards capturing the faces of the leads: above all, Mothersdale’s Angelo, utterly humiliated, face contorted and ineffectually concealed, a wonderful display of pride shattered. The other was the sensational use of humour, gradually emerging through the play, ingeniously concocted and carefully, specifically engineered by the Director, which unfoiled a whole, additional layer to the work, and lent a good number of ingenious contrasts. The wonderful gutted shock of the dottily amusing Lucio – Douggie McMeekin – at the close was a big treat in itself. But he, Claudio’s somewhat hapless but hardworking chum, and played here with terrific zest like a character out of Mistress Quickly’s tavern, was a delight on every entry. Add all this wit and flamboyance to the seriousness of the general gist, and what a vivid experience this whole, hurtling buzzing production proved. To 25-10-25. Roderic Dunnett 30-09-25 |
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