Abstract
Measure for Measure comes to us always in an adapted form. The only authoritative text, in the 1623 First Folio, was, we believe, based on a restaging of the early 1620s with added act intervals, a new song, and passages of new dialogue. The 2025 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production is still more heavily adapted. Both scripts recognise a peculiar contingency in the play's probings into the human face of issues that blight society, specifically the sexual mistreatment of women by men in power. Both add passages that root it more deeply within the specificities of the societies they inhabit. Both say that Measure for Measure always, still, urgently speaks to the audience of the moment.
The programme for the RSC production, 48 pages plus covers, gives ample guidance as to the production's values. It offers full-page images: here, closely, are Matt Hancock with his mistress Gina Coladangelo, Keith Vaz, and Nigel Farage cozying up with Donald Trump. Essays include Jenny Stevens's ‘Adapting Shakespeare’ and Monika L. McDermott's ‘The Single Unforgivable Vice’, namely hypocrisy in public office. This fiercely redacted production has the courage to ditch the crowd-pleasing comic scenes, which would have both diluted its unremitting focus and altered the premises of the story. Every detail relates immediately to Isabella's traumatic journey from potential nun to potential wife. Missing are Lucio's dissolute companions, the brothel-keeper Mistress Overdone, her clown-pimp servant Pompey, and the foolish constable Elbow. The sense of a deeply-textured society has gone with them. So too has much of the humour that leavens the distress in Shakespeare's play, and its richly symbolic resonances around locations such as Angelo's walled garden and Mariana's moated grange. This is a closet production involving a series of harsh encounters between individuals. Until the final scene, the stage is a box with sleek monochrome brushed steel panels. A side-on staircase against the rear stage wall leads to a challengingly high door. Overhead is a ceiling of diffuse light panels. Office and prison seem equivalent locations. Only the encounters within the space matter.
The story is reshaped and interpreted through scattered passages of invented dialogue, each a collage of fragments from other Shakespeare plays and original writing. To seasoned theatre-goers, focussed response is disrupted by the temptation to spot the quotation. Among the first words of dialogue, the Duke's ‘Triple-turned whore’ prompts many questions, most irrepressibly ‘Where have I heard that before?’. To make the point more theoretically, and more favourably, the production is pointedly readable in its active manipulation of our response towards perspectives that are not anticipated in the original script.
Perhaps needfully so, for the production fundamentally alters the story the play tells and its procedures in unfolding. The ambiguous Duke is here unambiguously a guilty man. The production begins with projected video clips of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Prince Andrew. They lead to a marked silence while the Duke (Adam James) looks through photos he takes from a brown envelope. Office furniture is matched with power-dressing suits. The dialogue opens with an interpolated passage, mainly a collage of Shakespeare lines. The woman he insults as ‘triple-turned whore’ is attempting to blackmail him for his sexual misdemeanours. The Duke is angry and defensive: ‘I am what I am’, ‘My deeds must not be shown’. After a weighted ‘What should I do?’ his plan to leave Vienna emerges. He will both avoid blackmail and, more damning, set up Angelo so that he can be scapegoated. The sense in which Angelo is not only substitute but also surrogate could scarcely be stronger. There is an obvious consequence: if the Duke effectively prompts Angelo to act in a predatory way towards a woman, Isabella is ultimately the victim of the former's schemes as much as the latter's.
The production introduces more narrative consolidation. Escalus (Sion Pritchard) tells the Duke about Angelo jilting Mariana, information that Shakespeare withheld until the second half of the play. The Duke brushes this aside with ‘Belike ’tis but a rumour’, anticipating his seeming reluctance to redress wrongs at the end of the play. In both scenes, he knows otherwise.
Claudio (Oli Higginson) is imprisoned by lowering vertical transparent panels over him. Concretizing Shakespeare's line about ‘the demi-god authority’, he laments ‘the demi-god Angelo’. For Claudio as for the Duke, Angelo might be corruptible, and in that lies his hope. When he asks Lucio to persuade Isabella to intervene with Angelo, his emphasis makes it clear that he sees her as deploying her sexual attraction for his own benefit.
Isabella (Isis Hainsworth) enters to climb up the staircase to the nunnery door. Strikingly young and innocent in her loose gingham smock, she speaks with a rural West-country accent. Interrupting her plans, Lucio (Douggie McMeekin) is a chubby-faced lad, worldly but sincere. Isabella wants to go into the nunnery to get ready for her task, but the nun turns her away from the door, sending her down to the main stage. She reflects on the ‘poor ability in me’: she is out of her depth.
She is very hesitant in first meeting Angelo (Tom Mothersdale), who is busy with paperwork behind his desk. With procedural correctness, he insists on his female assistant (Miya James) staying. Isabella and Angelo move across the set cautiously, keeping distance. Isabella explores the possibility of moral authority, eventually moving behind Angelo's desk, experimenting to find an intelligent and emotionally grounded voice. The scene is tense, but restrained until Angelo's aside ‘She speaks, and ’tis such sense …’. This is a big freeze moment that changes everything, and leads soon to Angelo's strong and searching soliloquy at the end.
In the episode introducing the Duke as ‘friar’, the true friar Peter (Valentine Hanson) wears a red cardinal's robe. He has already appeared as a complicit authority figure: ‘I know you of old’ he has told the Duke. The Duke-as-friar is a timid cleric in business suit, spectacles, and dog-collar. The heavily pregnant Juliet (Miya James) appears to him in the prison cell. Instead of her ‘Injurious law’ outburst, she declares ‘I would I had not known’ Claudio.
Isabella's dress for her second meeting with Angelo is green, anticipating the playscript when Mariana adopts Polonius's description of Ophelia as a ‘green girl’. The encounter again begins with restraint, but this time Angelo dismisses his assistant: ‘Leave me a while’. The scene becomes increasingly horrific as Isabella struggles to resist Angelo's power-driven arguments. Isabella is desperate and distraught by the end of it.
In the following scene, Claudio appears again in the transparent cell. The Duke's ‘Be absolute for death’ seems inept people-management. Claudio is trapped by its logic, but his ‘Let it come on’ is a loud, raw, and sarcastically resentful shout. It is Isabella who immediately comes on, clearly having arrived straight from Angelo. The siblings are already at the end of their tethers. The Duke leaves the stage completely, so the exchange between Isabella and Claudio lacks the usual safety net offered by his presence. Isabella at first is too distressed to tell Claudio the ‘comfort’ Angelo has offered. When she does so, he listens and tries to empathise, but his ‘Ay, but to die’ erupts with heartfelt anguish. Isabella can't believe what she's hearing, in an exchange where the words of the speaker and their effect on the listener are equally intense. They are both at an extreme, and break down into recrimination. The transparent cell wall separates them as they beat their palms against it in anguish. Claudio is so fearful that he vomits onto it, towards Isabella.
This brings the Duke in. His management works for want of anything else, inhabiting an unconvincing emotional vacuum; Isabella is numb, and his busy-ness seems trite. The bed-trick suggestion at first appears wholly weird to Isabella. From here, the scene plots forward at an emotional limp. When Escalus asks ‘What news abroad?’ he seems to recognise the Duke. So, later, does the Provost. This sort of behaviour in him seems all too familiar. Only Lucio calls it out, truly, as his name might suggest, the light shining into the Duke's dark corners.
Mariana's appearance is allowed a warmer bronze lighting. She enters from the top door, in smart clothes, worldly, impatient, making it still harder for Isabella to establish rapport as she broaches the bed-trick. Mariana accuses Isabella of ‘hypocrisy’ and exclaims ‘Ah, these men!’, but, accepting the world as it is, she is very keen to play her part – even if momentarily dismayed at the prospect of having to wear Isabella's frumpish dress.
This leads to a wordless mime, tilting towards the sado-masochistic, played out to the soundtrack of Elvis Presley's ‘Can't Help Falling in Love’. Angelo kisses Isabella. She kisses him, slowly takes off his shirt, then uses it to tie his hands behind his back. She takes off a sash as though about to undress, and uses it to blindfold him. Mariana enters, to substitute for Isabella as they begin to have sex, Isabella watching, the song continuing in female-voice choir. The first act ends in darkness, except for a projected black-and-white image of Isabella's face, a startling reprise of the earlier images, now presumably the face in Angelo's mind as he has sex with Mariana.
After the interval, Isabella washes her face, to a reprise of the choric ‘Can't Help Falling in Love’. The dialogue resumes with the arrival of the letter from Angelo commanding ‘Let Claudio be executed …’. Barnardine's cell is another location behind the door at the top of the stairs. The Duke climbs up to him, but is intimidated into turning back. He enjoys some humanisation in these episodes. He has just enough wry humour and comic indignation at Lucio's accusations against him to become an empathetic centre of attention. His kindness to Isabella seems only a morsel creepy. Though the purpose may be to show that even a hypocrite might have a bumbling charm, the overall story line seems a little clouded here, as the audience's sense of the Duke's hypocrisy runs perilously thin.
In a melodramatic episode, Ragozine's usually severed head is brought to Angelo attached to the rest of his dead body, lying on a medical trolley, with an attendant who unmasks himself as a ghostly Claudio. Angelo responds with horror. He has, throughout the production, been lukewarm and anxious for a stage villain, almost as though it were he as much as Isabella who had to ‘assume the destined livery’, to play a part that he is not really cut out for. His facial expressions constantly reveal contorted shifts of thought, suggesting anxiety, sometimes to serio-comic effect. It is a subtlety of what might otherwise seem a doctrinaire production that neither Angelo nor the Duke seems particularly evil in their being; it's that they both act in ways that are monstrous.
For the final scene, the set changes to feature a monumental staircase at the back of the stage. The Duke's re-entry is heralded by video footage of security police on motorbikes. The speakers take the microphone in turn. Two camera crew film close-ups of speakers and addressees, the images projected onto side-screens. The effect is both alienating and intensifying. Angelo's first speech follows a big build-up from the Duke, but as he takes the microphone he can manage only a bathetic one-line speech, suggesting his discomfort, as though fearing what is to come, or as though suddenly embarrassed by the unfortunate echo of what he remembers and we have seen, ‘You make my bonds still stronger’. And indeed, the Mariana-Angelo sex scene has been videoed and is displayed in public, to Angelo's horror. Isabella is equally horrified; she realises that the Duke has contrived everything, and she obviously connects this behaviour with his cruel trick of pretending that Claudio has been executed. To her, the Duke's ‘If he be like Claudio … say you will be mine’ is totally incongruous and emotionally deaf.
The denouements are fittingly uncomfortable. Angelo seems more struck by Mariana's deception than her sexual delights, and is desperate not to marry her. She tells him that she will expose him further if he refuses. Lucio is equally desperate not to marry Kate. Under arrest and accused of slander, he cries out ‘Truth is truth’. Reprieve is unlikely. All modern productions of Measure for Measure lead to the final moments where Isabella, in response to the Duke's proposal of marriage, says nothing. Here, she has an invented discussion with Mariana on whether she should marry him, with Mariana pragmatically and insistently in favour. Isabella bides her time, then, in stunned dismay, steps, runs, and suicidally leaps off the steps. Darkness.
The echoes are, of course, not only of Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca, but also of the death of Virginia Giuffre in April 2025. It is beyond this review to debate the rightness of this radical and chosen ending, with its blend of melodrama and immediacy. As a piece of theatre it builds on the production's other strong moments, to make an emotionally compelling and disturbing study in vulnerability. The significance of the final moment, and of the production as a whole, has only intensified in the time between this reviewer saw the production, when there was a Prince Andrew, and finalised the script, when there was not.