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Measure for Measure
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-Upon-Avon
THE deceptively simple plot of one of the Bard’s most problematic plays draws on conventional motifs, in which an unnamed ruler hands over his power to a deputy with the task of cleaning up his morally dissipated state, while a woman is challenged to give way to the new ruler’s lust in order to save her brother’s life.
It’s nominally a comedy, so of course all ends happily. But Greg Doran’s sharply etched production raises a question about the psychology of power which, understandably, comes into its own in modern times.
In it, Antony Byrne’s troubled Duke peremptorily breaks up his Straussian-waltzing court to launch his sociological experiment by handing the job of cleaning up the stews of 19th-century Vienna to Scottish Presbyterian Angelo (Sandy Grierson), a Putin lookalike.
The impassioned arguments of Lucy Phelps’s novice nun Isabella, pleading for the life of her brother who’s been condemned to death for having made his willing girlfriend pregnant, quickly finds Angelo’s bewildered constipated nature giving way to hidden depths, demanding sex in return for a pardon.
It’s a confrontation between two puritanical obsessives. Isabella’s “more than our brother is our chastity” is matched by Angelo’s self-agonising: “What art thou, Angelo? Dost thou desire her foully for those things that make her good?”
Disguised as a somewhat unbelievable friar, the Duke increasingly enjoys manipulating the characters like some manic puppeteer.
The much more human Viennese underworld characters — the dissolute roue Lucio who treats the disguised Duke to some slanderous home truths, brothel keeper Mistress Overdone and her pimp Pompey — provide comic relief to leaven the dialectic confrontations of justice, mercy and power.
Shakespearean comedies have to resolve in a bevy of happy marriages. Here three couples leave the stage to anything but credibly favourable future lives while the Duke, having pulled all the rabbits out of the hat, confronts a distraught and mute Isabella with his own proposal.
Runs until April 4, box office: rsc.com.
