In Black and White
Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice
The National Theatre
The Observer
Michael Rudman’s production of Measure for Measure (Lyttleton) has enormous carnival vitality. It reminds us the Shakespeare’s plays are constructed like variety bills, each incident designed to be bashed over the audience with maximum intensity.
There were more individual rounds of applause on the first night of this production than I have ever heard in the classical theatre. Some of this, I imagine, has to do with the nature of the occasion; Mr Rudman has re-set the play on an imaginary Caribbean island, and cast it for the most part with West Indians. The actors’ friends were in and they reacted with volatile partisanship. It was after all an historic productions; black actors have never been so abundantly employed on a central stage.
By Mr Rudman’s lights the audience counted almost as an extension of the play; in a programme note (a welcome return to an old tradition whereby the director generously furnishes the critics with rope for use at his own execution), he writes that Measure is a public play, whose major characters live or die by the reactions of the crowd. Lucio’s jokes, for example are cracked for the delectation of an enthusiastic bunch of low-lifes, equally ready to lynch him when he falls foul of the Duke.
I think Mr Rudman is essentially right, but he does run into problems. Shakespeare in this play, often mentions ‘the people’ but when he gets down to presenting them he seems only interested in what, even by Elizabethan standards, must have been an unrepresentative sub-section. Life is centred first on the brothel, all the characters being either inmates or customers, and then, after the vice-laws have bitten, in the prison. So Mr Rudman’s basic set, right down to the last scene, has to be the red-light district.
It seems off that the Duke should choose this area for his ceremonial re-entry; odder that none of the bourgeoisie should be hand to welcome him; and oddest that she should be crammed together with his henchman Angelo and Escalus, on to a balcony at the side of the stage. A better of microphones does something for their official image, but the stage pictures is lopsided and the action slips away.
Two major characters are white: Leslie Sand’s magnificently worldly Escapes (who seems, confusingly, to be in on the Duke’s masquerade) and Antony Brown’s Provost, good chap, but hidebound. They presumably are the relics of some former regime. Now the island is in the hands of Stefan Kalipha’s playboy Duke, who goes into priestly disguise because… here I have to stop since Mr Kalipha’s rather nervous performance offers no solution to this, the play’s central problem.
Yvette Harris’ Isabella states emotions without exploring or elaborating them. Both these actors have trouble with the verse: Mr Kalipha tries to bury it, Miss Harris lets it bury here. Only Norman Beaton is on easy terms with it; his Angelo is an uncompromising Puritan - a cleric, in fact- who deliberately retreats behind his desk and into officialdom when Isabella begins to get him. An actor who once managed, quite superbly, to play Ariel as a civil servant, obviously has no trouble with Angelo; he is complete master of old words and new modes. Maybe his best moment is his icy retreat when the comic relief arrives; under the leadership of Oscar James’s Pompey, which has real swagger, they pose an unaccustomed threat.
Bertice Reading plays Mistress Overdone, temporarily reprieved from jail so that, disguised as a night-club pianist, she may sing, ‘Take, O take those lips away.’ That song of course is in the text; not so the number that Peter Straker’s Lucio, promoted to super-pimp, sings about the beneficent effect of sexual prohibition on the flesh-market. He performs it wonderfully, polishing it off with a stunning falsetto, and Tommy Eytle’s lyric beats the hell out of every new musical in London. But it puts us in another convention, and we spend the rest of the evening waiting frustratedly for it to be followed up. In sum, Mr Rudman makes mistakes, but he makes them in the right spirit: joyous, not reductive.
By contract the gags in The Merchant of Venice (Old Vic) are aimless, means of somehow getting through the play, or up and down the steps of an archaic set, which makes the Queen of the Adriatic look as if she’s being held up by the scaffolding. Timothy Went, re-directing a former production, is his own best actor and such subtleties as exist-apart from the engaging portrayal of Salerio and Solanio as a right pair of Job’s comforters- are to be found in his performance; Shylock’s realization in the midst of mourning for Jessica that Antonio is now in his power is a sharp corner negotiated with a quiet businessman’s relish that carries through into the trial. Stephen Jenn is a golden boy Bassanio who actually makes you listen to his casket speech, but Prunella Scales’s Portia really needs a script by Congreve.