Patrick Carnegy

Conjuring with morality

You can see why Harold Bloom, in his marvellous book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, should have called Measure for Measure one of Shakespeare’s most ‘rancid’ plays. But it’s also one that he greatly admired, though it takes a good production like Roxana Silbert’s new one at Stratford to show you just why.

Bloom’s rancidity resides in the unpleasantness of the characters, and in the way in which even the seemingly virtuous go about their morality. Wisely eschewing any overly specific setting, Silbert lets the costumes do the work. It isn’t just the thriving sex industry in ‘Vienna’ that enjoys restrictive clothing, but the Duke and Angelo, both affecting leather corsets worn over roll-neck sweaters reminiscent of 1930s fascist uniform. Repression rules, OK, and this also means an Isabella primly dressed from first to last as a probationer at the nunnery.

The production offers an unusual solution as to why the Duke, entrusting the unpopular work to his puritanical deputy Angelo, suddenly resolves on a purge of the city. Raymond Coulthard plays the Duke as an avuncular ruler with a taste for theatricality. The exposure of Angelo’s hypocrisy becomes an elaborate practical joke in which the Duke, returning incognito as a seemingly benign Friar, finds perverse pleasure both as puppet-master and voyeur. Coulthard enjoys showing off the conjurer’s conventional party tricks, though these are but the outer show of the less agreeable games that the Duke plays with his subjects. Coulthard has both devastating charm and authority which he doesn’t hesitate to use to woo, but maybe not to win, the audience’s complicity.

Jamie Ballard’s Angelo is no obvious devil, just a tediously solid fellow with zero emotional understanding and zealous confidence in the letter of the law. He doesn’t exactly answer to Lucio’s description of him as peeing ‘congeal’d ice’, but his smile is certainly enough to chill the blood.

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