Not Only Opera

A rare breed: Measure for Measure at the Donmar

Measure for Measure
Donmar Warehouse
Circle C6, £10
5 November 2018
Donmar page

Gimmicks can be noisy and they can be tyrants, and they generally make a nuisance of themselves. Far rarer is the gimmick that knows what it’s about, but such a one can be found in Josie Rourke’s production of Measure for Measure for Donmar Warehouse. While it may still have a few touches of tyranny, Rourke’s gimmick is also ingenious, clever, entertaining and important, executed such that it becomes an illumination of rather than imposition on Shakespeare’s already glimmering play.

The gimmick is that the play is played twice: once a familiar Measure for Measure in faux-Elizabethan costume; and then a repeat, except in modern dress and with the roles of Angelo and Isabella reversed. Angelo’s still called Angelo and is still a man, but now he is brother of Claudio, supplicant to the pitiless Isabella, love interest of the Duke. All other roles, excepting Angelo/Isabella’s former attachments, remain the same. The Duke is now a vague civil servant, Angelo a recovering drug addict, Isabella’s final shaming vilely explicit, and no one can stop looking at their smartphone.

Tyranny comes in the shape of brutal cuts to fit the play into one act. This is a thoroughly business-like Measure, even in the longer first half. The loss is great, but not careless. Practically it must be done to allow the gimmick; and the deeper slicing of the second half is acutely managed to ensure the repeats are meaningful, and never merely repetitive (the phones come in handy for that).

What makes this loss acceptable? It doesn’t take a genius to see that Measure for Measure is on trend with MeToo. It’s a wonderful play and it was written more than four hundred years ago, so its depiction of the abuse and blackmail of women by powerful men, and the hypocrisy and slimy resilience of those men, is already interesting and upsetting, MeToo or no MeToo. Rourke directs the first part with a clarity and simplicity that makes the immediate relevance emphatic, aided by the nature of the cuts made and further abetted by intriguing, unusual performances in particular by Hayley Atwell as Isabella, Jack Lowden as Angelo and Nicholas Burns as the Duke.

So the first half is already interesting, and its focus becomes all the more interesting in the context of the second. In Measure for Measure the abusers are male, so too in most of the MeToo revelations and so too for most of human history, as received wisdom has it. You would be forgiven for thinking that women were serial victims, ever to be abused, and that men were serial abusers, ever to abuse – a depressing world view indeed. What happens when you see a women abusing her power? What happens when you see a man a victim of abuse?

I ask them as questions because there is a sense of experimentation in this Measure. Rourke does not dictate what we should be thinking when we see that inversion, or the original, and I’m sure everyone in the theatre would have differing opinions and feelings depending on their own set of prejudices. For my own part I had greater sympathy for Isabella in the role of Angelo, I guess because I now saw her as a victim of the Duke and of her husband; but that sympathy existed around the painful horror I felt at her abuse of Angelo. The Duke is ghastly in both versions, but when in the first his socially normative possession of Isabella seems dictatorial and insensitive, in the second his tricks to ensnare Angelo are still disrespectful but now conniving and underhand – why not declare his love instead of spooling together elaborate ways of depriving his object of choice?

So this gimmick robbed the play of a lot of its literal substance, and in return illuminated its contemporary relevance in two complementary and interesting ways that could only work in the context of Measure for Measure. As I say, a rare breed of gimmick.