Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s famously difficult plays, which is why it isn’t often staged. It doesn’t so much refuse to give the audience the compulsory happy ending as plonk down a happy ending so preposterous that nobody will find it in the least satisfactory (and this is the reason for the successive mangled and bowdlerized versions of the play produced in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). This production by Creation Theatre did nothing to mitigate the grimness and pain depicted throughout this, um, comedy, or to ameliorate the awkwardness of the final denouement, but everything to emphasize what a riveting story it is, and by their setting, bring it bang up to date and make it grittily relevant to our own dear society, obsessed as it is with sex, power, and celebrity.
In the graffiti-daubed streets of Vienna, a fairly graphic depiction of a customer getting a blow-job sets the scene for Mistress Overdone’s diatribe against unpopular ducal deputy Angelo’s new regime of strictly enforced anti-sex laws. Times is hard for madams – all her brothels in the suburbs are to be closed down – she passes on the misery by informing regular customer Lucio that his friend Claudio has been arrested for getting his fiancé Juliet pregnant, and is due to be executed that day. Cue for the central, nail-biting drama of the plot – Claudio’s sister Isabella, a novice nun, can save her brother’s life only by agreeing to have sex with Angelo. Isabella, played by Amy Stacy as a decidedly feisty and passionate girl, leaves us in no doubt that this is too much to ask of her, and when the cunningly disguised duke has persuaded Angelo’s spurned fiancé Mariana to take Isabella’s place, the audience is left in no doubt that having sex with Angelo actually means submitting to a pretty brutal rape. Surely Angelo is one of the least appealing villains in Shakespeare’s work. Having (as he thought) had his wicked way with Isabella, he then goes back on his word and orders the immediate execution of Claudio anyway. Fortunately the duke thwarts him once more, substituting the head of a recently deceased pirate when Angelo asks for physical proof of Claudio’s execution.
But here’s the thing. Angelo, with his tormented monologues, is so conflicted he is not so much a dyed in the wool hypocrite as a split personality. He has a deeply unhealthy attitude to women and sex and would clearly benefit from a lot of therapy. But he’s not the worst baddy in the bunch, because as this production makes abundantly clear, he is all along the dupe and plaything of the manipulative duke, who has basically set him up as the bad cop to his good cop, then entrapped him into committing in swift succession extortion, rape, murder, and finally exposed him for the rat he is, and punished him by making him marry Mariana. This is bad enough, but the duke also decides, having saved Claudio’s life, to conceal this fact from his sister and allow her to believe he has been beheaded. How cruel is that? In the final minutes of the play he has Claudio brought on stage, confronts Isabella with him, and then asks her to marry him. Shakespeare did not put an answer to this question into the final scene, so it’s up to individual productions to decide whether Isabella greets this prospect with rapture or outrage or – as in this production – a combination of consternation and horror. There’s nobody around powerful enough to punch the duke on the nose, which he so clearly deserves, but we can certainly hope that Isabella will use her passion and skill as an advocate to always have the last word off-stage even though she is denied it on.
This is a production that has powerful conviction and pulls no punches. There were several children in the audience last night, for whom it most certainly was not suitable. But grown-ups should definitely give it a go.
