Theatre: Measure for Measure
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (01789-331111). Until 29 August Running time: 2hrs 35mins ★★★★
A young woman in desperate need of help from the authorities stands in the office of a powerful man. He offers a terrible bargain: her body in return for his aid. Horrified, she threatens to report him. His response is chilling: “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” The exchange could be from a cutting-edge new drama, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. “In fact, it’s 400 years old.” The man is Angelo, the stand-in governor of Vienna; the woman is Isabella, a novice nun whose brother has been sentenced to death for fornication. The play, of course, is Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure. And that pivotal scene “makes your flesh creep” in Gregory Doran’s exemplary new staging for the RSC, as Sandy Grierson’s “quivering Angelo lets his hands roam over Lucy Phelps’s petrified Isabella”.
The great virtue of Doran’s “lucid and compelling” production is that it “nods to the #MeToo parallels without getting itself entangled in them”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Doran has located the action in the Vienna of the early 20th century – offering a vision of an “Austrian high society we think we know, paired to a licentiousness and avarice” that still takes us aback. It’s a setting that makes “total sense”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian – one in which the “initial image of a glittering waltz-time world” gives way to a pin-sharp portrait of “public hypocrisy, seething sexuality and a fierce contest between the spiritual and the secular”. This is far and away the best Shakespeare production at Stratford this summer, and will then tour until April next year.
It’s a thrillingly staged production, agreed Michael Davies on What’s On Stage. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s atmospheric designs – full of “shadows and foreboding” – are complemented perfectly by evocative lighting and music. And there are cracking performances across the board, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Antony Byrne is terrific as the disguised Duke, both “puppet-master and voyeur”. As Angelo, Grierson is a coil “wound so tight” that you are “torn between laughter and terror”. And Phelps, who was also a tremendous Rosalind in this season’s As You Like It, again “proves a star in the making” as Isabella. Her “every moment has a static charge”.