An innovative problem
The Groundling company of expert Shakespeareans, who bowed in last year with an admirable Winter’s Tale, have brought it back, in tandem with a new and equally compelling production of Measure for Measure. In this one, the audience sits on the Winter Garden stage while the actors perform on the edge of it. Proximity and authority cast their customary spell.
Graham Abbey, a core Stratford actor turned director, offers a modern- dress staging with one innovation: the permissive Duke of Vienna, who leaves his city in the hands of a puritanical deputy and sneaks back in a friar’s habit to see how it all goes down, is now a Duchess or, when disguised, a nun.
Lucy Peacock gives her more character- progression than some of her masculine predecessors. She’s thoughtfully worried by her responsibilities, genuinely alarmed and craving reassurance after hearing some of the things people say about her. The production even grants her an early sneak peek at Isabella, the convent novice to whom she will end up proposing. But there’s a problem. The action hinges on Angelo, the deputy, sentencing Isabella’s brother to death for impregnating his fiancée. We’re asked to believe that a society that has the death penalty on its books for premarital sex will nonchalantly accept gay marriage. It doesn’t add up.
But the heart of the play has been captured, in the scenes of Angelo’s attempted seduction of Isabella when she comes to beg for her brother Claudio’s life.
Tom McCamus plays an Angelo unlike any I have seen. Suited and bespectacled, he is the perfect legalist, measuring his words, coldly weighing the odds — even at moments of greatest passion. Michelle Giroux, an exceptionally warm actress in a traditionally icy role, carries us with her through all her pleadings, rational and emotional, even keeping our sympathy when deciding that more than her brother is her chastity and then turning on that brother when he objects.
There are supporting performances that I’m tempted to call the best I’ve seen in the roles: Patrick Galligan, a gentlemanly Escalus impenetrably doubled with the dedicated executioner Abhorson; Charlie Gallant, a Claudio equally urgent in misery and defiance; Mark Crawford, both as a constable Elbow whose righteousness is impregnable and whose malapropisms are actually funny, and as Barnardine, the death’s row prisoner, achieving immortality by declining to be hanged. Roy Lewis is a sympathetic Provost; Steven Sutcliffe as Pompey the assistant bawd scores both as cynical commentator and appealing clown; and Karen Robinson switches social registers from Mistress Overdone, the head bawd, to the jilted lady Mariana ( and I never knew she could sing).
Brent Carver’s Lucio too suffers from the ducal genderbending. Lucio may be reckless but he would never talk to a supposed nun as licentiously as the original has him do to a supposed priest.