Rotten core
Patrick Carnegy
Measure for Measure Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Aleading politician gets caught in a sex candal — some things never change,' thus the somewhat desperate flyer for the RSC's latest attempt at Measure for Measure. That wiley commentator Harold Bloom calls this Shakespeare's most 'rancid' comedy, and indeed it needs some selling. Alas that the 'leading politician' isn't recognisably one of our own — an opportunity missed — but, scrupulously respecting Shakespeare's instruction, one of Vienna's. though the city is here shown at some time between the two world wars. Very understandably, the thing has often been to plump for Freud's Vienna, thereby hoping to offer psychoanalytic credence for the play's implausibility. But this time it's a Vienna so far removed from psychological scrutiny as to make one pine for the return of the magus of the couch, for a key to make sense of the rancidity, of the tussles between sexuality and public order which infest, and indeed are, the rotten core of the play.
A prominent notice in the foyer (very correct, this) warns not against gunfire or foul language — no shortage of the latter when you get your ear in — but against nudity. Maybe we were to be shown Angelo's possession of his supposed Isabella in Catalonian XXX explicitness, or was the cover to be blown on the covert sexual preferences of the 'woodman' Duke? Not a bit of it. All that was on offer was the lumbering body of Barnadine, a death-row prisoner so permanently drunk that no one had the heart to top him. And what was on view would barely fill a codpiece, let alone commit the mischief that sets the play in motion — Claudio's getting his girl (wife in all but name) with child. For this deed — just about the most wholesome in the entire play — Claudio must die, condemned by the tight-arsed sexual hypocrite Angelo. Famously. this Angelo has been set to clean up Vienna by the very man under whose libertarian governance it has slid into the abyss, Duke Vincentio. Quite why so many of the characters bear Italian names is a subject for another day. Shakespeare gives the game away when he christens the street-life with names that declare he's never straying more than a mile or two from the Thames — Mistress Overdone, her bawd (pimp) Pompey Bum. Elbow (a constable) and Froth (a foolish gentleman). Never mind, let it be Vienna or anywhere else in which an epidemic of sexual disease may be symptomatic of the incompetence of its rulers. They are indeed a strange bunch, with only the elder statesman Escalus (James Hayes) wise enough to know when to punish and when to spare. The puritanically precise Angelo, doubtless a lawyer as the production suggests, must have been danger enough to the state as deputy leader, and folly unbounded to have been left in charge.
The deep trouble at the heart of Sean Holmes's ill-directed production is that he's also got the casting so wrong. Emma Fielding, handicapped by being got up like a landgirl with her hair in a scarf and a flared coat too short for her frock, has a valiant stab at Isabella. Her best moment comes at the very end when she's stunned — perhaps at last into insanity — by the Duke's insistence she should marry him. Angelo and Vincentio are furiously difficult roles, and on them everything depends. Daniel Evans does come somewhere near Angelo, making him a little self-important official, bustling about with his papers. Turned on by Isabella as she despairingly pleads for her brother — seriously kinky this, for the novice-nun succeeds where every whore had failed — he swallows hard, squirms, twists his neck like a turkey-cock and hastily crosses himself as temptation strikes. Weird, though, that this shell of correctitude should unbutton jacket and collar, thrusting hands into trouser pockets (some Freudian significance here?) before declaring himself to Isabella. Certainly it's a clever, arresting impersonation. but Evans sold the horror of Angelo something short and you couldn't quite credit that this was the man who, if we're to believe John Lloyd Fillingham's Lucio (more credible than most on stage), pees 'congealed ice'.
What, then, of Paul Higgins as the Duke? Doubtless the less the better, for to one jaundiced spectator, browned off by the whole evening, he gave no credence to any imaginable interpretation of the role — displaced religiosity, diabolical puppetry, sheer malevolence, sexual perversion, or what you will. It's an over-busy performance in which the enunciation of the uncomfortably brilliant verse is a per petual casualty. The unholy accent he adopted as the Friar at first seemed Glasgow until I was persuaded it might be County Antrim before concluding it can only have been Viennese. Anne Barton has it about right when she suggests that, if any sense is to be made of the play, the Duke has to be 'Shakespeare's own surrogate as a comic dramatist', and of that we are given simply no hint.
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