Abstract
With the first half performed as a period piece set in 1604 and then shifting to present-day 2018, Josie Rourke’s production mounts a scaled-down version of Measure for Measure twice, reversing the gender roles of Angelo and Isabella after the interval and changing the original premise of the play’s toxic sexual politics to address the #MeToo generation. The Donmar’s simple set design (by Peter McKintosh) emphasises the bright cruciform lighting fixture, mirroring another thin cross etched into the flooring below. Serving as seating for Mistress Overdone’s large crew of colourfully dressed and head-kerchiefed prostitutes and a sauna for the Duke later, wooden benches lining the back wall also become a chapel altar for the Clares’ lighted candles: Isabella (Hayley Atwell), in a simple taupe linen habit and matching cap, extinguishes each candle in turn as she enquires about the Clares’ further constraints. Wearing a tightly pulled back ‘man bun’ and a rich jerkin decorated with prominent buckles – apparently purely mechanical rather than psychic restraints – Angelo (Jack Lowden) holds the Duke’s elaborate gold chain of office aloft as he exits proudly with his new commission. Trimmed down to just over an hour, the action proceeds rapidly to the heart of the conflict. Angelo perceives an intimacy in Isabella’s entreating hand placed on his bosom as she pleads for Claudio’s life, pointing quizzically to her exiting figure, ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ (2.2.167). Lowden’s subtle interpretation of the character’s reaction requires we watch his facial register carefully, his rapidly shifting eyes expressing surprise in comic mode; alone in the next scene, he is peeved and dismayed to discover his shameful desire.
Stalking the stage, Angelo menaces, closely shadows Isabella, who smiles beatifically at the thought of ‘whips’ and ‘rubies’ (2.4.101) afflicting her keenly. Suddenly disabused at Angelo’s ‘seeming, seeming!’ (150), she turns on him in passionate fury. At this, in the 1604 period production’s most clear topical allusion to current events, Angelo assaults Isabella sexually, groping her and forcibly performing oral sex on her through her clothing while the Provost (Adam McNamara), lingering upstage for the duration of the dimly lit interview, witnesses the scene in silent complicity. Later, after she reveals her distress outwardly by lashing out at Claudio (Sule Rimi) for pleading for his life – she slaps her uncomprehending brother in rage – the Provost slowly slides a glass of water to her along the wooden bench, a possible attempt to calm her; a peace offering for his enabling of Angelo; or both. She simply regards it. Intervening swiftly to repair the debacle (cut completely are the unrepentant Barnardine and the groaning Juliet), the Duke (Nicholas Burns) visits Mariana (Helena Wilson), who is sequestered at the moated grange and self-harming herself with a very sharp knife. The Duke’s largesse is also revealed as self-interested, for he comforts Isabella’s sorrow over Claudio’s apparent execution while, somewhat voyeuristically, scenting the air above her head as she lies sobbing in his lap.
Drawing the abbreviated play to a rapid close, the final scene unfolds in the Duke’s courtroom, the back benches full of spectators. The Provost particularly enjoys hauling Angelo off to marry Mariana offstage, apparently regretting his complicity in the assault on Isabella. After a long pause, Isabella reluctantly joins the still abject but tearfully smiling Mariana in their plea to save Angelo’s life. Another pause stalls the action as the Duke fruitlessly awaits Isabella’s response to his proposal before revealing Claudio lives. The siblings cradle each other on the floor, more in sorrow than relief, perhaps anticipating the Duke’s aggressive claim to Isabella clearly intended to recapitulate Angelo’s earlier assault, ‘what is yours is mine’ (5.1.530). Lying prostrate on the floor, Isabella wails her fierce protest; in another room full of witnesses, she has always been leading up to this moment since the earlier scene with Angelo.
Suddenly brightly flashing lighting (by Howard Harrison) and loudly whirring music run backwards (sound design by Emma Laxton) signal an abrupt shift in time, during which Isabella becomes the Duke’s deputy magistrate – taking up the role from Angelo, she changes into a tight dress fitted with a long zipper up the back and receives a red hang-tag office badge from the Duke. Her commission must be texted to her because the Duke needs to duck out, hiding his face with his suit jacket from unseen paparazzi. The transition to the play’s re-performance – the second half is re-set in 2018 – is conveyed in deft strokes, all before the interval.
Stage productions that modernise Shakespeare’s plays frequently exploit ready, even witty parallels to familiar, present-day elements: the Duke gives his instructions to Escalus (Raad Rawi) over his mobile, and Pompey (Jackie Clune) pimps her lounging, vacantly mobile-scrolling prostitutes in loud, heavily Russian-accented English, provoking laughter from the audience, and flicks contemptuously at Escalus’ tie; she and Mistress Overdone (Rachel Denning) ostentatiously record their legal proceedings on their phones with entirely modern savvy. Claudio, wearing a beautifully bespoke tailored suit, now laughs uproariously at the charge of fornication, and reasonably so: similar to the fate of many plays that focus heavily on decidedly early modern notions of chastity, changing the setting to 2018 creates some new logistical tangles. While Claudio’s absurd plight of being charged with ‘getting / Madame Julietta with child’ (1.2.64–5) could even more clearly highlight the arbitrary and thus horrific nature of such a crime and capital punishment for 2018 (especially for a black actor), Rourke’s production sidesteps some of the difficulties of swapping 1604’s gendered conflicts for today’s (how can parties be forced to marry in a free modern society?) while highlighting others.
As the uptight bureaucrat Isabella, Atwell, with her previously ingenuously naive smiles, now becomes palpably insecure in her new position of authority, with expressions reduced to insincere, polite facial tics. She has no time for Angelo’s pleas for his brother’s life, listening instead to her voicemails. As a hip, modern-day male evangelist dressed casually in jeans with free-flowing long hair and a prominent crucifix necklace, Angelo leads a prayer circle seated on metal folding chairs, holding the hands of his downcast flock. He prepares for life with the Clares by putting his worldly goods into plastic bins, as if entering the prison cell where later he will tend to Claudio: like the 1604 Isabella, Angelo is naive about how his earnest piety will be received by Isabella – the passion with which he grabs Isabella’s arm to plead with her shocks her into sexual awareness, but this reaction is rendered comically in the vein of one of Joss Whedon’s ‘rom-coms’. The audience laughs as she fiddles with her high-heeled shoes, nervously taking them on and off in response to being titillated, but this is even more comical than the 1604 Angelo’s oscillating gaze: could this all just be a misunderstanding? While both actors take their turns playing the aggressor’s role in a nod to a gender-equal opportunity of exploitation, this potentially complicates the production’s other choices that wish to underscore the present-day #MeToo movement’s focus on female abuse. For instance, the final court scene – which translates the role of Lucio (Matt Bardock) effectively into a gadfly barrister in wig and robes, constantly interrupting the proceedings – now stages the courtroom witnesses’ testimony as awkwardly self-conscious, painstakingly enunciated performances spoken into microphones, while Angelo appears with his supporters bearing banners reading ‘Justice’ and ‘#Truth is Truth’. This courtroom setting is meant to evoke a recent American scene, namely Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony before Congress about her sexual assault during the Justice Kavanaugh proceedings, just a few weeks earlier in the fall of 2018. Yet in Rourke’s rendition, the antagonist’s gender is now changed to female.
Similarly, Pompey’s derisive laughter (echoed by the audience) at Angelo’s claims that Isabella had ‘his chastity against his will’ [ad lib] suggests the play wishes to evince a thoughtful parallel to 1604’s misogynistic assumptions about a woman’s susceptibility to ‘putting on the destined livery’ (2.4.138): but surely it is still stereotypically a man who would not refuse sexual favour by female invitation? The audience witnesses a scene equally uncomfortable to the earlier, with Isabella pressing Angelo’s face into her body in simulated oral service and being pleasured audibly. However, since no male or female abettor witnesses Isabella’s unwanted sexual advances on Angelo, as we saw the Provost doing earlier in the first half’s pointed interpolation, the second part of the performance resists fully equating the female Isabella’s actions with the likes of today’s accused male abusers. In other words, the production’s change in period does not wrestle fully with the implications for gender and the allusions to the #MeToo movement that it sets into motion, though it challenges its 2018 Donmar Warehouse audience in thoughtful ways.
At the moated grange, Frederick (Ben Allen, in the Mariana role) is being treated at a psychiatric facility for abandonment by Isabella; he listens obsessively to her mobile’s ring-tone, which we recognise (earlier, too, Isabella has listened to a voicemail, which we can identify as Orsino’s vengeful threat to Cesario to ‘kill what I love’ (5.1.115) in Twelfth Night, a somewhat obscure allusion to another gender-bending plot). Because Frederick’s male-gendered melancholia cannot be as easily remedied as Mariana’s sexual therapy in the form of the bed trick that will also later guarantee her the partner who pleases her, he remains despondent to the close, humiliated by his part in the bed trick despite Isabella’s vocalised pleasure, which he audio-records as ‘revenge sex’ and plays before the courtroom as the central piece of evidence against her denials of impropriety. Isabella mocks Frederick sexually – his ‘promisèd proportions/Came short’ (5.1.216-17) and ‘[Angelo’s] wits are not firm’ (33) – for his performance during the bed trick. If Isabella is thus punished by marriage to Frederick as befits the play’s original plot (albeit unrealistically), then the Donmar’s modernisation also sees the morose Frederick punished by marriage to Isabella as a form of collateral damage, whereas, however misguided she may be, the Mariana of 1604 is fully rewarded. Isabella may cynically abuse her office for sexual favour, but the 2018 production reveals a yet underlying misogyny as the louche Lucio and his fellow barristers openly resent the female magistrate for punishing ‘the rebel-/lion of a codpiece’ (3.1.358–9) since boys will be boys.
Rourke mines unexpected moments of humour in the play and also introduces other more familiar menace. His natty suit exchanged for an orange prison jumpsuit, Claudio receives the disguised Duke, another hipster type wearing black thick-rimmed glasses, jeans, trainers and a hoodie worn over his clerical garb and collar while he quaffs a caffeine tonic. Pontificating in cooler-than-thou philosophical cant, the Duke bores Claudio so profoundly that he discovers a ‘newfound willingness to die’ [ad lib] to the great amusement of the audience. Just as the 1604 Duke picks up where Angelo leaves off with a desire to possess Isabella, so too does the 2018 Angelo find himself subject to the Duke’s predation; the swapping of gender roles, though, necessitates that the Duke’s assault be on Angelo, or the now unhappily all-too-familiar modern cultural spectre of a predator priest abusing males.
In its final moments, the production reaches the logical endpoint of its period shifts and gender reversals: though we witness the Duke forcibly kissing Angelo, rather than present us with the premise of Angelo’s being coerced into a same-sex union with the Duke, the stage action instead suddenly halts. Our attention returns to the starkly spotlit figure of Atwell’s Isabella, once again appearing onstage wearing her 1604 linen shift and cap, to inform us that she has ‘come to know your pleasure’ (2.4.31) – a pleasure perhaps more honoured in the observance than the breach.