LAUSR

This production of Measure for Measure, “a distinctly and deliberately unromantic comedy” at the Donmar had a wonderful twist. Its theatrical hook was unusual and original. The first half was a truncated version of Measure for Measure, in its 1604 Viennese setting, with historic Jacobean dress, and more or less gender-norm casting. The second half was the play retold, set in present 2018, with contemporary dress, Isabella switching positions with Angelo, who was now her sexual prey. Their names, when spoken, are three syllables – Isabel and Angelo – and this three-syllable switch, doing nothing to disrupt the metre, hinged the play and catapulted us through the looking glass into an entirely different world: a world that looks like our own, replete with mobile phones and disco lights. The vision of the play in its entirety was a triumph. Josie Rourke powerfully directed a well-rehearsed, intensely told story, where the actors were connected to each other and the text. It compellingly asked difficult questions of gender, law, sexuality and authority. And yet the strangest part of this event was that making the second half contemporary disrupted what was most familiar about the play in its historic iteration. In fact, surprisingly, what became clear was that the most direct way the play speaks to our present is to be told in the past. The play opened with Peter McKintosh’s simple and elegant set, with golden lighting in a cross shape, canopying the almost bare stage. The floor was suggestive of marble, with a wooden border. The stage was surrounded on three sides by the audience, and the space intimate. The back wall had a long wooden bench across it and in the central foreground was a short wooden bench where Duke Vincentio sat, his back to the front thrust of the audience. The very first image was like a crucifixion, with bodies marking out a cross and Angelo, bestowed with responsibility of Duke, in the sacrificial centre. This underlined the tension between state and religion, between man’s law and the higher pressure of a punishing and ethical law that involves sacrifice and austerity. Wonderful, simple and powerful, the staging often traced the lines of a cross. At times the text – which necessarily was cut to shreds – lacked the usual nuanced perspectives of Shakespeare’s play. The complexities and difficulties were rendered easier by broad brushstrokes. This retelling privileged the two protagonists – Angelo and Isabella – and the supporting cast circled their drama, rather than having their own tangential stories. We lost any sense of the carnivalesque and the dangerous resistance of the underclass. We lost Barnardine and his refusal to be killed: “I swear I will not die today, for any man’s persuasion” (4.3.56-57). We lost Elbow, Abhorson, Varrius, Juliet, Lucio’s associates, Friar Peter and Froth. The characters that remained were sometimes confusingly conflated, lines distributed between them, as with Pompey and Mistress Overdone. The first crowd scene in the brothel, where an ensemble of bawds lined up on the long wooden bench by the back wall, was handsome and, again, elegant. But the roles seemed superficially comic rather than offering any profound social commentary. Despite the loss of textual detail, the play that remained was sleek. The actors gave consummate performances. The language was pronounced trippingly, with clarity and conviction. At times the stage crackled. This production was electrifyingly taut.