Fascinating, Frustrating and Racy to the Finish

MEASURE FOR MEASURE
the stratford festival
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This year's Stratford Festival is ending in an orgy of orgies. A brief gay group scene has been added to Marlowe's Edward II; it couldn't be called irrelevant but it does risk obscuring one of the play's main merits, which is that it takes homosexuality for granted, something that wasn't to happen again in English drama for close on 400 years. Meanwhile, a new production of Measure for Measure begins in a strip club, one that's obviously doubling as a brothel, all tastes obliged. The merrymaking here comes to an abrupt halt when the joint is raided, by troops under the command of Angelo, deputy to the Duke of Vienna.

This is strange, because it's only in the subsequent scene -- or, as Shakespeare would have it, the first one -- that Angelo is given the authority that would allow him to conduct such an operation. It's handed to him by the Duke, who announces that he's leaving town, trusting that the notoriously ascetic deputy will clean the place up in his absence. Even in pure showbiz terms, it might have been more effective to start with this sober exchange and then to bring on the debauchery -- which is what Shakespeare's text, in a slightly more restrained manner, actually does.

Once out of the gate, however, Leon Rubin's production, set by John Pennoyer in various shades of contemporary Gothic, offers an engrossing account of a perenially fascinating, if perenially frustrating, play. Measure, unlike Edward II, actually is a play about sex. Angelo's crack-down on vice involves the resurrection of a disused law forbidding non-marital sex, and the consequent condemnation to death of Claudio, who has got his fiancee pregnant. Isabella, Claudio's convent-bound sister, goes to plead for his life; and Angelo, as aroused by purity as only another puritan can be, offers a deal: Claudio's life in return for Isabella's virginity. She refuses, appalled. This being a comedy, there's a way out, but it requires a lot of manipulation.

Most of the intriguing is in the hands of the Duke, who has stayed around, disguised as a friar, ostensibly to see whether Angelo can live up to his own pretensions. In fact, hardly anybody in this play can. Angelo's fall is obvious. Isabella seems to care far more for chastity than charity; when the terrified Claudio suggests that she might take Angelo up on his offer, she verbally flays him alive. The Duke makes three. He, too, starts out denying the claims of the flesh; the end of the play finds him proposing to Isabella.

All three roles are strongly played at Stratford. Jonathan Goad's Angelo starts out a sincere, if bloodless, young idealist; he then falls almost visibly apart in his two long interviews with Isabella, which he rightly identifies as scenes of mutual temptation. He also, hardest thing of all, keeps us with him through the play's last judgment, by which time he is a tortured shell, riven with self- disgust, who welcomes his own unmasking.

There is less of a straight line through Dana Green's Isabella, but there is a succession of exciting moments. She is as much the legalist as Angelo himself, and you can feel her locking minds with him even as she shrinks from locking bodies. Thom Marriott's Duke is well-intentioned but congenitally manipulative; like his fellow principals he learns painful things about himself -- a process implicit in the play and that Marriott takes further than any actor I've seen, though not, to my taste, far enough.

Jeffrey Wetsch is a touching if sometimes incoherent Claudio, and Paul Hopkins makes, in both senses of the adjective, a sympathetic Provost. The low-lifers admirably capture the play's shifting view of vice, as a trade to be condemned, condoned and, finally, tolerated -- much where we are today. Andrew Massingham's Pompey is an inventive and ingratiating music-hall pimp, who gets fine comic support from Shane Carty, Brendan Averett and Stephen Gartner. Mistress Overdone is played with majestic lewdness by Diane D'Aquila, this season's Mistress Underused; she doubles as a very aged nun, and bends double to do it. It's made clear throughout that the religious life is terrible for the posture; the disguised Duke, who looks more padre than friar, has a permanent stoop, as of one bending over forwards to gain people's confidence.

The Duke's return is most cleverly staged. This final scene has to seem like a big public event; this small-cast production brings it off by involving the audience; the scripted spectators, waving flags or petitions, are placed among us; Don Carrier's Lucio, clown prince of the underworld and a whimsical blend of satirist and sycophant, is delightedly and delightfully in his element. The revelations and reversals are excitingly done, and Marriott's Duke dispenses justice and mercy with humour as well as humanity -- which is what the text suggests and most productions studiously ignore. Then comes the unscripted kicker. Isabella, given no lines, greets the Duke's closing proposal with silent dismay; another man is hitting on her. This isn't a new interpretation; in fact it's standard modern. But the production hasn't prepared the ground. This Isabella's spiritual vocation has never seemed more than an exaggerated passing phase; and there has been definite chemistry, and not of the father- daughter variety, between herself and the Duke. For once in a staging of this play, a happy ending looks justified, and denying it seems a gratuitous slap in the face. So I doubt this production's end as I doubted its beginning; I was also disturbed in the middle by frequent re-writes, not all of them of passages that are impenetrably archaic. This is becoming a most irreligious habit, and it can't be good for the souls of actors or audiences. Other than that, everything's very fine.