Emily Burns’ version of the ultimate ‘problem play’ is, in many ways, the perfect Shakespeare production. It’s bursting with creativity and original interpretations, but not a single one of them feels forced or capricious. Burns finds a modern relevance for the play which is not hung on it like an arbitrarily chosen, ill-fitting suit, but rather brings new depths of understanding without stretching credulity. It has deep respect for the original text, but doesn’t shy from playing fast-and-loose with it when it needs to. In short, it’s completely brilliant.
Opening with a sequence of video clips including Epstein, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew and Harvey Weinstein, there’s no doubt from the very start what this Measure will be calling to account. The modern setting feels not arbitrary but urgent, vital, current and accusatory.
Burns has stripped away the parade of minor Viennese characters – bawds, cutpurses and sex workers – that make parts of Measure For Measure feel like a sixteenth-century version of The Third Man, and has focused the play squarely on Angelo’s sexual exploitation of Isabella. The effect is a jolt of Me Too recognition. Costumes and sets are all sleek steel, electric blues and perfectly rectangular glass windows – the sort of interior design that powerful businessmen like to surround themselves with. It feels like the 86th floor of the Waystar Royco Building in Succession. But, just as with certain powerful businessmen, the cleanness of the exterior serves only to accentuate the sleaze behind the style.
Purists may be up in arms about this production. It imports healthy chunks of Othello to beef up the part of the ‘wronged woman’ Mariana with a dose of Emilia. Mariana (Emily Benjamin), abandoned by the sexually repressed hypocrite Angelo in her moated grange, emerges not as a humble innocent, subservient both to her cruel fiancé and the requirements of the plot, but as a force of Nature, taking what is rightfully hers and arguing for it cogently, albeit with another play’s script. Burns has taken even more of a liberty with the opening scene. In Shakespeare’s original, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, is leaving the city on a diplomatic mission, and he makes the disastrous decision to leave Angelo as his deputy, unaware that his bureaucratic underling intends to clean the scum off the streets of Vienna while satiating his own dark desires at the same time. Here, Burns has expertly woven Sonnet 121 into the Duke’s opening remarks, making him as implicit in the dance of hypocrisy as his own deputy. In fact the concluding line to that sonnet could sum up this production’s view of the patriarchy: ‘All men are bad, and in their badness, reign’.
If this seems like too much meddling with Shakespeare’s text, it’s nothing compared to what Burns did with Sheridan’s The Rivals at the National Theatre a few years ago, where it was completely rewritten (but still retained a few of the original lines) as Jack Absolute Flies Again. For my own part, I would far rather see a director intelligently interpolate relevant extracts from other sources than change lines just to make the play suit their own ill-fitting concept (as with last year’s RSC celebrity football version of Much Ado About Nothing).
The result of all these targeted textual tweaks is a show which burns with clarity and purpose. The spotlight is literally on Angelo’s merciless treatment of Isabella throughout, and as a result the play has an intensity that silences the audience in horror and wide-eyed fascination. Ice-cream melted off plastic spoons suspended half-way to people’s mouths as they watched him condemn Isabella’s brother Claudio to death after supposedly having his way with her.
The rape scene / bed trick itself (which does not appear in Shakespeare’s original) is a wordless and audacious dumb show that qualifies as one of the coups de theatre of the year. As Angelo disrobes the virginal Isabella, Elvis croons ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You’ – the perfect choice of ‘seductive’ music for an older, powerful man. But as the scene develops, and Isabella’s fear and horror intensify, Elvis’s voice is replaced by a church choir, and the repeated words ‘Take my whole life too’ assume new, much darker, meaning. It’s not a love song. It’s a ballad of control and surrender.
As Isabella, Isis Hainsworth, in her debut RSC role, is a revelation of clear-eyed desperation and pure-heartedness. At the end of the play, faced with a future of marital imprisonment, her actions consciously recall the climax of Thelma and Louise in a statement of terrifying and single-minded freedom. Tom Mothersdale, as her nemesis Angelo, gives us a masterpiece of predatory lust mingled with sheepish shame and self-disgust. The scene where, all alone, he confesses his consuming culpability (‘Nothing goes right: we would, and we would not’) is reminiscent of Disney’s Frollo contemplating the pit of hell for his hidden desires beneath the unforgiving gargoyles of Notre Dame. Mothersdale frequently gags on his own lines as if the guilt needs somehow to escape (as Christian Friedl did as Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, in The Zone of Interest – another story of a faceless bureaucrat who indulged his desires without restraint).
Amid all the innovation, the text remains clear and bold. Lines jump out at you, reinventing themselves across the years with relevance that Shakespeare could not have intended but resonate nonetheless: ‘Kings who made laws first broke them’. ‘It is excellent to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.’ ‘You must lay down the treasures of your body’. Perhaps most of all, this one, simple line of Isabella’s leaps across the gulf of four hundred years to unite the past with the predicament of every woman caught in the clutches of a lecherous, powerful man: ‘Who would believe me?’