Measure for Measure (1978)
Birmingham Post 28th
June 1978, J.C. Trewin
Simplification is suspect: but it is not always wrong. This feverishly argued dark comedy can live in the light of purely theatrical logic without too much searching for fresh explanation.
Just four years ago, probably in the key of the
Duke’s “Novelty only is in request,” we had at Stratford as silly a production as I can recall. The newest
revival, directed by Barry Kyle, is certainly comforting (though it faced last
night an audience determined to pluck laughter from every scene).
The uncommon idea here is merely to present the
play with a forthright clarity, more or less as it was written. Its people
emerge from the simplest of all-purposes black backgrounds to a final
resolution on the forestage. There are productions that I shall remember more
readily, but this is a good RSC standard and better than the season’s first new
productions.
Michael Pennington, the equivocal Duke, who chooses
to become “a looker-on here in Vienna,” is the richest speaker in the Stratford
company. He acts a man, long-debated and troubled by the problems of authority
(we have had various reasons for his masquerade) who is primarily a useful
figure for the development of theatrical narrative.
Paola Dionisotti, compared with some Isabellas, is
rather less whiter than white; she and the Duke will probably get on very well
in future. Jonathan Pryce is a perfectly serviceable Angelo, that symbol of
emergent lust, who has to suggest bonfires on the ice.
We get an alert, mature Lucio (John Nettles); a
Mariana with fewer Tennysonian overtones than usual; and a Claudio (Allan
Hendricks) who needs only to give the true Jacobean intensity to the word
“thrilling.”
One innovation – when did the prisoners last sing
“Every night and alle night”?
The Guardian 7th
November 1979, Michael Billington
Barry Kyle’s production of “Measure for Measure”,
now at the Aldwych, has undergone some major re-casting since I saw it in
Stratford last year. David Suchet, Sinead Cusack and Natasha Parry have taken
over as, respectively, Angelo, Isabella and Mariana. This alters the tone of
the production a good deal: it in no way diminishes one of the most intelligent
and sure-footed accounts of the play for a very long time.
The basic image remains the same: an austere black
box, with numberless doors, that easily alternates between grim and judicial
chambers and a Behanesque prison where the inmates rattle their cups against
the bars on the eve of an execution. There is also the same stress on the
appearance-and-reality theme. ‘O, what may man within him hide. Though angel on
the outward side’ is the cornerstone of the interpretation. Just as Angelo the
black-garbed puritan is revealed as a man of ingrown, thwarted sensuality, so
at the end the Duke and Isabella finally lay aside the friar’s habit and the
veil that have cloaked their true natures.
But though the original outline remains intact, the
detail has changed enormously. Where Jonathan Pryce’s Angelo was itchy with
sexual frustration, David Suchet (who is rapidly growing into a major actor)
plays him as a legal precisian amazed at what he finds inside himself. ‘Do I
love her?’ he asks after Isabella has left the room, weighting the crucial verb
as if it has never darkened his lips before. And there is one superb moment
when he lays an intellectual trap for her (if her brother’s fault was only a
‘merriment,’ why can Isabella not yield herself to him?) and is visibly hurt
when she wriggles out of it. You can easily imagine Suchet as the star Viennese
barrister who has kept his passion locked in his briefs.
Sinead Cusack’s Isabella is more conventional: an
unworldly novice pregnant with spirituality but I liked her gentle ironic
stress on the circumlocutory metaphors Isabella uses to tell her brother he’s
for the chop. And there is a very striking Mariana from Natasha Parry: a mature
beauty who has obviously had her trousseau ready all these years just in case
fate (or a friar) came knocking at the door.
Michael Pennington’s Duke also remains an extremely
brainy study of a onetime ascetic who, by putting on religious gear, discovers
the worldliness buried inside his own nature. In short, a first rate evening.
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