Serenading Louie
Donmar, until 27 March
Measure for Measure
Almeida, until 10 April
Genius detectors, busy in America, want us to meet the playwright Lanford Wilson. He hasn’t made much impact here possibly because his talent is so vast it can’t be hauled across the Atlantic. His 1970s play Serenading Louie focuses on marital infidelity in the suburbs, and English audiences are entitled to make comparisons with our home-grown chroniclers of bourgeois disenchantment. Wilson doesn’t stand much chance, I’m afraid. His static, pain-strewn narrative has none of the fun or sparkle of English suburban drama. And where Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh could manage one good line every couple of minutes, Wilson manages one every hour. ‘Love,’ says a maudlin cuckold, ‘is a neurosis we agree to have together.’ A frosty wife reflects on early encounters with her husband. ‘Actually I didn’t love him then. But I love him then now.’ No one could fault the sincerity of this handsome and skilfully acted production but the script is a wordy, disappointing dud.
Over to the Almeida where Michael Attenborough’s production of Measure for Measure opens with prog-rock visual detailing. The palace in Vienna boasts darkly opulent tables, chunky chandeliers and thrones carved with knobbly finials. When the duke appears, sheathed head to toe in a velvet wizard’s robe, the impression of Ozzy Osbourne’s rumpus room is complete. But the duke’s lieutenants seem to have wandered in from other shows altogether. Escalus is dressed like Henry Higgins in an Edwardian frock-coat. Angelo seems to be kitted out for a David Lodge campus comedy in his donnish tweeds, ginger beard and with a pair of spectacles which he swaps for contact lenses. Could this sartorial vacillation be a subtle dig at Shakespeare, who wrote this play without deciding whether it was a tragedy or a comedy, or who the main character should be?
The plot starts off being silly and then becomes completely daft. The duke abdicates temporarily in order to see how the ship of state will fare without his wise hand on the tiller. Angelo, his shifty and pedantic deputy, immediately goes power-mad. He sentences Claudio to death for lechery but offers to spare him if his convent-bound sister, Isabella, will submit ‘the treasures of her body’ to Angelo. It’s hard to see where our sympathies are supposed to lie here. The story, in its elements, involves the attempts of a fanatical puritan to ravish a rather intense nun. The central characters are distorted and unappealing. Claudio is a feckless chancer. Isabella is an hysterical prude. Angelo is a callous, manipulative hypocrite and — just for good measure — a rapist. Meanwhile, the wily duke has swapped his Ozzy Osbourne cape for a monk’s habit and he prowls the fringes of the action, fine-tuning his prank, hatching new plots to overcome unforeseen obstacles, and occasionally lifting his hood to deliver a deathless truism in rhyming couplets before melting back into the shadows. The whole thing is extraordinarily contrived and it overturns the received wisdom that Shakespeare’s mature works are blessed with a miraculous naturalism that makes them seem like snapshots of real life.
The actors succeed best at bringing out the characters’ least-charming qualities. Anna Maxwell Martin gives a convincing portrait of po-faced virginity. Ben Miles, as the duke, harmonises nicely with the show’s visual style. He looks every inch the rock god brought low by debauchery and he manages to make sense of the duke’s binary nature, his regal dogmatism and his maverick benevolence. Rory Kinnear is perhaps ill cast, and is certainly ill dressed, as Angelo. With his warm, languid voice and softly expressive features, Kinnear is better suited to playing undemonstrative generosity than the seismic nastiness essential to Angelo. The macho petulance of Claudio is well brought out by Emun Elliott. When Isabella visits him in prison she announces that she has rejected Angelo’s bargain. He begs her to change her mind. No chance. Lump it and die, is her rather heartless message. This prompts a lyrical vision of the afterlife that rivals anything Shakespeare wrote. ‘To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,’ muses Claudio, ‘This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod.’ It’s a pity Elliott applies so much raw emotion, so much volume, to these lines. Meditative tenderness might be more effective.
This faulty play contains flashes of sublime poetry and rhetoric which will reward any attentive observer. The text is especially beloved of teachers and moralists because it provides a marvellous platform for discussions about the application of justice and the compromises between rigour and compassion. If you want a debate, start here. If you want genuinely entertaining drama, look elsewhere.
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