The Duke Abides: Stratford covers all the bases for a riveting and perplexing production of Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Shakespeare set Measure for Measure in Vienna. (Well, he name checks the place twice.) Martha Henry's Stratford production places us in that ambiguously liberated city, just after the Second World War: Harry Lime time. It works, creating a climate of cankered bureaucracy and sexual unease, not to say disease, befitting a story in which a lax ruler takes leave of absence, bequeathing his powers to a notoriously puritanical deputy and then returning incognito to see how he gets on.

You couldn't hope to find better acting, direction or indeed writing than in the two scenes in which the newly empowered Angelo faces the novice nun Isabella who's come to plead for the life of her brother Claudio, condemned to death for impregnating his girlfriend, and finds himself, for the first time in his life, falling in lust. Tom Rooney gives a magnificent, searching performance of a man obsessed with law and morality, and convinced that they're the same thing. As his self-image crumbles he finds himself literally grasping at things: clutching at books, papers, finally and violently at Isabella herself, all of them slipping through his fingers. (This production is as full of props as Romeo and Juliet is empty of them, but both excel at seizing on the text's suggestions and making them real.) Rooney's is a quiet performance, very logical and measured, until it collapses, violently, into a new kind of fanaticism, desire and self-hatred mixed.

"She speaks, and my sense breeds with it," is how he puts it; and it may be the way Isabella talks that first attracts him; they're both great legalistic arguers, and the severe habit that envelops Carmen Grant's convent trainee (most Isabella'‘s give themselves more leeway when they go a-calling) gives him little else to go on. She matches him as a logician, cool at first, then goaded into moral passion, feeling her own strength. Angelo's blackmailing bargain -her body for her brother's life - sends her into shock; left alone, she reaches for the phone on his desk (she's a prop person, too) before realizing she has no one to call. Her desperate summation - "more than our brother is our chastity" - sounds, for once, right: for her, anyway.

The tremendous force of these scenes, and of Isabella's subsequent one with Claudio (Christopher Prentice, passionate and perplexed), has its downside; it throws into even sharper relief than usual the drop in dramatic pressure when the disguised Duke emerges from the shadows to take over the action and steer it from disaster. He does it in rapid prose that suggests the playwright as well as the character is improvising his way out of an impossible situation. For one thing, he reveals discreditable things about Angelo that take the shine off what we had taken to be the corruption of a saint. The Duke himself seems in this production to have a past. He makes his first, pre-abdication entrance, through the door of a cage that's an impressive permanent feature of John Pennoyer's set, in surprise disguise; either he's been getting some spying in early, or his taste for dress-up is already well developed, or the cynical Lucio was more right about the Duke's non-ducal habits than even he might have guessed. Talking (again) of habits: along with his friar's uniform, Geraint Wyn Davies' Duke borrows a Welsh accent (which to this actor, of course, comes naturally) from one member of his host order and a pair of spectacles from another. This gives him charm, along with his natural unforced authority, but it's sometimes hard to tell whether it's the actor or the character who most enjoys exerting it. The Duke is a perennial puzzle - moral force or heartless manipulator? - and this production and performance, intentionally or not, leave him ambiguous.

A crowd of good performances cover all the play's bases. On the streets there's Stephen Ouimette's raddled Lucio, an irrepressible hard case, Randy Hughson's pockmarked pimp, and Brian Tree for whom the role of Elbow the indignant constable was probably written. On the bench there's Peter Hutt's Escalus, finding a remarkable range of magisterial gradations. In prison, there are Stephen Russell's properly gentle Provost, Robert Persichini huge and hairy as the unregenerate Barnadine, and Ruby Joy bringing unwonted pride to the pregnant Juliet. In the moated grange, here equipped with its own ferry, there's Sarah Afful's Mariana who sings her own song. The list goes right down to the First and Second Gentlemen, the latter of whom (E. B. Smith) doubles as the executioner Abhorson, a true professional. There's also a dog. The last scene, in which they all (except the dog) foregather, is very well-ordered, tense and exciting. The production is both riveting and perplexing: like the play.