Arts
Richly layered
Giles Gordon
Measure for Measure (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Volpone (The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon) Nevis Mountain Dew (Arts)
Daniel Massey's burr-voiced Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, would surely not have left his city — the text of Measure for Measure to the contrary — in the hands of David Schofield's Angelo if the latter hadn't already irrevocably been his Deputy. From the beginning, Angelo seems such a rampant boor, crypto-fascist and hideous verse speaker that the Duke must have seen through him long before he entrusted him With government. The suggestion, in Adrian Noble's dazzlingly intelligent and richly layered production, is that Vincentio but pretended to leave Vienna and, all the While in Friar's habit, observed Angelo's antics, knowing he'd quickly betray his trust. This is borne out by the Duke's awareness — not apparently a piece of new information — of how Angelo had treated his betrothed, Mariana (Emma Watson, stoic, magnanimous, unable to lose her love for the seedy little man). Why the Duke felt compelled to show up Angelo and risk such havoc is a secret Mr Noble and his tortured, distraught, distinguished Vincentio keep to themselves.
Bob Crowley has set the play in a Mozar- tian Vienna, with campanile doubling as high-rise block and hinting at Venice. Ilona Sekacz's tapestry of music is similarly sen- suous and effulgent. As the same produc- tion team achieved with King Lear last year, a society and social order are evoked and this makes sense of a famously complex and dark play. The bustle and intrigue of Vien- na is all-present, and I've never before understood so readily the play's hierarchy, Joseph O'Conor is a sturdy Escalus whom the Duke must have realised would, insofar as his office allowed, act as a check on Angelo's worst excesses, and the excellent Oliver Ford Davies is a prison governor With a keen sense of morality. As Mr Noble's King Lear opened with that unforgettable image of Cordelia and the Fool yoked in death, so here do the im- ages before the first line is spoken provide a brief chronicle of how the director sees the play. Against varnished, baroque music, the ravishing (double meaning, I think, altogether intended) sound of a woman's voice is heard, singing sacred music and simultaneously being pleasured. The Duke is signing the last papers he'll read before
lending authority to Angelo. This done, he walks to the tall, gilt pierglass that dominates the scene and changes from ceremonial, red coat to more workaday black and gold, watching himself. His back is to the audience and we do not know — as he betrays nothing — what he feels or is thinking. Later, when Angelo has proposi- tioned Isabella (Juliet Stevenson), he looks in the same mirror and reels back, loathing himself but able to live with the self-disgust.
The clothes of the ruling classes disguise the true characters of their wearers whereas those of the lower orders reveal theirs. Richard O'Callaghan, straight out of Amadeus, is a venal, lethal, eloquent Lucio, a delicious, definitive performance; Anthony O'Donnell a most puffed-up Pompey; Roger Hume a puzzled, serene Dogberry of an Elbow; and Peggy Mount so gorgeous a Mistress Overdone that the Bard should be castigated for providing her with so few lines.
The most astonishing thing of all is Miss Stevenson's Isabella. That she almost ef- faces from the memory Judi Dench in the part in 1962 is meant as a compliment to both actresses. That she makes Isabella, who merely declines to go to bed with Angelo in return for her brother's life, the raging moral centre of the play without seeming a prig (or receiving any titters from the noisy per crinklers, sweet eaters, coughers and talkers in the audience) is remarkable. It is — unlike in the last RSC production when a feminist Isabella re- jected Vincentio's blandishments — in- evitable that she and the screwed-up good old man should pair off.
Volpone, in spite of no gondolas or cam- panile, is very much set in — and a product of — Venice, and Bill Alexander's rather detached production provides a full text: less rare Ben Janson than well, even over- done. Alison Chitty places the action in a Jacobean room, with panels opening to display drawers crammed with glinting treasure trove, and others acting as win- dows, doors, spy-holes and places of con- cealment.
Miles Anderson is a most waspish, cynical Mosca, definitely a mate of Iago. A realist, as sceptical about the human race as his playwright, he has no more contempt for Voltore (Henry Goodman), Corbaccio (John Cater), Corvino (John Dicks) and the other birds of prey than he has for his master and indeed himself. Which, in a way, is the drawback. I wasn't, by the end, much concerned with the unmasking of anyone, everyone's so ghastly. The would- be procurers of the old Magnificio's in- heritance, shrouded in black and feathered, are all finely played and characterised as much as the corrosive satire permits. It's very much an actor's play, and every part is well-taken. Gemma Jones has wonderful fun with shifting vowels, raucousness and gentility as Lady Politic Would-Be, and Bruce Alexander as her husband is a failed mercantile Don Quixote.
Richard Griffiths is a strangely listless Volpone. Even when attempting to seduce Celia (Julie Peasgood), he's just going through the motions. He exudes little character or personality in spite of a great deal of bustle, leaping onto and off his vast bed, thrusting a bandage at his foot, making-up his face, robing and disrobing, winking and leering. He caresses the silvered verse lingeringly with his lovely voice (a soft Welsh malt with stream water) as if reluctant to let it go.
Black Theatre Co-operative's production of Nevis Mountain Dew is remarkable for the embarrassment of T-Bone Wilson lying in an iron lung on stage for much of the evening, looking up into a mirror which is angled so that he may observe the audience's reaction to the play, and the au- dience may watch him watching it.
Ralph Richardson was a dangerous, subversive genius. His performances deepened the mystery of the universe whilst at the same time illuminating it.
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