In Vienna and Venice

Measure for Measure
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

I started this column, 10 years ago, just in time to catch Laurence Olivier’s last performances in the theatre. It is five years, though there has been no official farewell, since John Gielgud appeared on a London stage. Ralph Richardson remains to us. Peggy Ashcroft gets younger. These four dominate British acting and have done so, incredibly, for half a century. I have waited for a decade to announce the triumph of the next lot; but I am quitting at the end of the year and the transition is obviously not going to happen before then. 

Not that I lack memories. I have watched Judi Dench become great on an unassailable blend of instinct and technique; listen to her when her tumbling words are chasing her feelings and you will get a definition of theatre. She can be volatile or implacable: as can Michael Gambon, a delicate shambles who could well be the next Sir Ralph. 

I have looked into the eyes of Ian McKellen, glinting from the other side of the abyss. I have witnessed David Suchet raising direct and vigorous character-acting to a higher power. I have seen Julie Walters bouncing and enjoyed the impudence of Simon Callow. Jonathan Pryce has scared me, Bill Paterson convulsed me, and Julia McKenzie has done more with a song than I would have thought possible. 

Entire Royal Shakespeare Companies and Shared Experiences have blown my mind. I have held my breath at Antony Sher and Cheryl Campbell, and will do so again when they stop treating every role as if it were an assault-course. There are dozens more. It is acting, not writing, that people discuss on the journey home. 

All the same, talking about my g-g-generation, I have to admit. In British acting, at the last judgement, means classical acting. Our old lions were lucky because their elders (I generalise, but not wildly) were boulevardiers, offering no challenge. Their juniors go into films and television. It gets annually harder to assemble a decent company at Stratford. Adventurous casting merges into sheer wishful thinking. I forget when I last heard a Mark Antony who, when he announced that he was no orator as Brutus is, did not have me muttering “too right”. (Not that the Brutuses have been so hot either.)

This year’s Mark was David Schofield, a good actor with a hollow eye and voice, who last week at Stratford took on Angelo in Measure for Measure, and played him as a creepy but conscientious junior civil servant. This indeed is what Angelo is, as far as character goes, but he does have these racking speeches about being sexually tempted, and as long as they’re there it seems a pity not to do anything with them. 

A greater pity, since entering the lists with him, and going straight to the top of mine, is Juliet Stevenson as Isabella. A long, serious girl with a questing voice and a melting face, Miss Stevenson discovers several things about Isabella, all to do with being young and sheltered. One is precociousness: she has hardly entered the judge’s chamber before she is sitting at his desk. Another is conceit: when she first pleads for her brother’s life there are spectators present and she plays to them. There is sanctimony: consigning Claudio to death, she gets him to kneel down and pray with her. And compensating for all these there is vulnerability: driving her first to cling to her chastity and then to surrender it to the Duke. She goes on a  journey from ice-maiden to romantic heroine: maybe the first such heroine this play has ever had. 

A similar progress is hinted at in Daniel Massey’s Duke, but only hinted. A critic once said that what you make of the play depends on what you make of the Duke, and that personally he didn’t know what to make of him. Neither do I; and Mr. Massey, though a pleasure to listen to, leaves the role and the piece opaque. Adrian Noble has placed his production in a Mozartian Vienna: a choice that does more for shape (the resolution is very satisfying) than for atmosphere; the darkling piece has little to do with the Enlightenment. 

The best of Bob Crowley’s set is a savage diagonal of a prison wall. An omnipresent mirror is appropriate for the play’s talk of glassy essences, and for the introversion of its central trio. The last scene though is fatally split between indoors and out. The funny scenes are fair, with a pinched Lucio counterbalanced by a fruity Barnardine and a massive Mistress Overdone. Paul Mooney, the season’s most promising actor, makes a rough-edged but compelling Claudio.