Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Martha Henry
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
May 29-September 21, 2013
Isabella: “... man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured ....”
The Stratford Festival’s current production of Measure for Measure reveals it as one of Shakespeare’s most modern plays. Its depiction of political corruption, buried sex scandals, sexual harassment, and anti-vice campaigns show, yet again, that concerns we often think are modern are not so at all. While the production has a very strong cast, what is missing is the menace and repressed desire that make the play viscerally exciting as well as intellectually challenging.
Director Martha Henry, who was one of the Festival’s most memorable Isabella's in 1975, has taken an unusual approach to the play. All previous productions of the play that I’ve seen have focussed on the interplay between Isabella, the young woman who is hoping to become a nun, and Angelo, the deputy of the absent Duke Vincentio. Isabella has come to Angelo to plead for the life of her brother Claudio, who is condemned to death under the Duke’s previously unenforced law against fornication. Angelo, enflamed by Isabella’s beauty and virtue, tells her that she choose between sleeping with him or consigning her brother to death. This terrible dilemma is what normally drives the drama.
Yet, as in the later romances, other forces are at work in the play. Vincentio is not absent but merely in disguise. He has given his power temporarily to Angelo both to test him and to have his own laws enforced, like that one against fornication, that he knows would have made him unpopular. This mixture of motives suggests that he is a thorough Machiavel ready to sacrifice his deputy in order to keep his reputation clean. Knowing Angelo’s own dark secret, Vincentio is ready to use it to help Isabella free her brother. She hardly expects or desires the Duke’s own proposal of marriage.
Henry emphasizes this second plot at the expense of the first. For someone who has seen the play many times, it is fascinating, if peculiar, to see it done this way since it makes virtually everything that happens appear to be an intentional part of Vincentio’s machinations. This can’t be true, of course, part of the point of the play is that Vincentio has gone underground because he fears what will happen when his anti-vice laws are enforced. It just happens that Isabella’s brother’s case will be the first time the law is used, so that when he sees the human side of things he helps her as part of his damage control. Shakespeare explicitly emphasizes that Vincentio is not in control through the character of the prisoner Bardardine, who simply refuses to be executed, thus thwarting Vincentio’s plan to find a substitute. Shakespeare clearly indicates that Vincentio finds a substitute purely by chance when he learns another prisoner has died, becoming a kind of cadaver ex machina.
Henry begins and ends the play with the focus literally on Vincentio (Geraint Wyn Davies). Before the dialogue begins, he enters dressed as a woman suggesting not only that he likes to snoop incognito among his subject but that there may be some dark corners to his personality. When Henry played Isabella, the production closed with a spotlight on her and her distress. As director Henry concludes her production with a pinspot on Wyn Davies, as if the play were primarily a study of corrupt officialdom. Ideally the two plots should be balanced against each other. The less is seems that Vincentio is in control and is, in fact, scrambling for ways to save the bad situation he created, the more tension there is. With Vincentio seeming to be fully in charge, even in disguise, the tension is lost.
Contributing to the lack of tension are the performances of Carmen Grant and Tom Rooney as Isabella and Angelo. Grant speaks verse clearly and with understanding and her Isabella is full of sincerity and reason, but her expressions of emotion and gestural language are so restrained we have to agree that her brother’s friend Lucio’s opinion of Isabella also applies to Grant: “You are too cold; if you should need a pin, You could not with more tame a tongue desire it”. Usually, Isabella starts out as “too cold”, but unfortunately Grant’s expression of emotion remains exactly the same throughout despite the fact that the problems she faces only become more difficult.
For his part, Angelo, according to Vincentio, “scarce confesses That his blood flows, or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone”. Yet, Tom Rooney makes him appear to be only a petty bureaucrat, not the petty tyrant he should be. Other players of this role have relished the opportunity to show a man who is barely able to tamp down rampant desire. Under Henry’s direction we see little struggle between his inner and outer selves except in Act 2 in his only soliloquy, “From thee, even from thy virtue!” Rooney doesn’t give us a portrait of a man abusing his “little brief authority”, as Isabella says, but a weak man who simply gives into his weakness.
The chief comedian of the play is Claudio’s friend Lucio, a pimp among other dubious trades, who is brought more vividly to life by Stephen Ouimette than I have ever seen the role before. He is the boisterous anti-establishment spirit who goads Isabella on to save her brother from an unjust law and who doubts the Duke is as virtuous as he claims he is. Because of this we can only view the Duke’s punishment of him at the end as too severe.
Next after him in creating comedy in the midst of darkness, is Brian Tree as the constable Elbow. The combination of his exaggerated military stance and gestures with his frequent malapropisms reveal him as the comic reflection of fallible authority. Randy Hughson and Dylan Trowbridge are hilarious as the two “benefactors”, Pompey and Froth, that Elbow has apprehended, while Patricia Collins gives us a screeching version of the madame Mistress Overdone. Robert Persichini would be more effective as the recalcitrant prisoner Barnardine if Henry had not given him an unnecessary voice changing microphone.
Among the more earnest characters, Peter Hutt and Stephen Russell make Escalus and the Provost much more interesting figures than I’ve seen before. Russell is especially good at bringing out the Provost’s compassion, not what one would expect from a the warden of a jail, but in that way a criticism of the mercilessness of Angelo and the Duke. Christopher Prentice movingly conveys the agony of a young man who feels so defeated by injustice he can scarcely believe in hope.
Henry has updated the setting to Vienna in 1949, same year as the classic Vienna-set film noir The Third Man. Though neither Henry nor designer John Pennoyer exploit the possibilities of film noir in the production, Pennoyer has created a range of effective period costumes, especially men’s uniforms, that contrast the poverty and lassitude of the common people with the wealth and strictness of those in authority. Just a few set pieces like a kiosk with fading posters are enough to conjure up the a city devastated after war, and the Janus-faced lamp on the desk used by Vincentio and Angelo is a brilliant touch that brings out several layers of Shakespeare’s symbolism.
While the central scenes between Angelo and Isabella need greater emotional impact, the production is otherwise so solid it will impress audiences with the surprising contemporaneity of Shakespeare’s approach and subject matter. This is a play that every theatre-lover should know, and even if the plots in the present production are not as balanced as they should be, there is still much to learn and enjoy from this production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Carmen Grant and Tom Rooney; (middle) Geraint Wyn Davies. ©2013 Michael Cooper.
2013-06-12
Measure for Measure