Director Leon Rubin’s sly and stylish production of Measure for Measure-a study of the politics of power and sex-takes one of Shakespeare’s less-performed plays, and through it demonstrates the old maxim (one that merits constant repetition) of how little things change.
Well, of course, some things do change: costumes, hairstyles, accents. (For example, the main character of the play, the postulant nun Isabella, wears a gray suit that could have come straight from Sister Helen Prejean’s wardrobe in the movie version of Dead Man Walking.)
But Shakespeare’s story of political corruption and violent sexual assault hypnotizes on the Stratford stage with an energy that cannot be attributed simply to good acting and clever conceits of modernization: this is first-class delivery of excellent and eternal lines, and Rubin’s dark 21st-century stage aesthetic of dance clubs, strip joints, and corporate offices could not seem more appropriate.
Measure for Measure centres on what goes on in Vienna when the Duke, Vincentio (played with sufficient solemnity by Thom Marriott), leaves the city for a time and puts the corrupt and scheming Angelo (Jonathan Goad, who is more than sufficiently serpentine) in charge.
Isabella enters the scene in an attempt to save her brother Claudio from execution: an old law against extra-marital sex has been somewhat randomly enforced against Claudio, and Angelo is determined to see the law’s peculiar version of justice done. When Isabella pleads her brother’s case, Angelo offers to release him in exchange for sex. It is up to the Duke (now disguised in the city as a wandering priest) to set things right, which he contrives to do without revealing who he actually is.
The best scenes in the play come courtesy of Dana Green’s downtrodden and vulnerable Isabella. Her interpretation is that of a modern feminist: Isabella here speaks in calm and rational cadences; Angelo’s interruption is thus one of particular chaos.
Director Rubin’s staging helps this contrast along by making the scene of Isabella and Angelo’s first confrontation a moment of savage physical assault-an atrocity not clearly present in the scene as written, but managed with enough realism and sensitivity to make the moment work without crassness.
In some ways, it would be more challenging (and interesting) to interpret Isabella as less of a modern feminist and more of a crazy religious fundamentalist-she refuses to have sex with Angelo even though the act would set her brother free, and justifies herself with exuberant speeches on purity. The most powerful scenes in the production are possibly Isabella’s eerie defense of virtue in the face of imprisoned Claudio, who begs her to give in to Angelo so that he might survive; yet one wonders, even as one admires the performance, how these lines can be spoken without any semblance of sermonizing.
The obvious counterpoint, of course, is that Isabella is a féministe manquée, an Artemis figure, her religious zeal an outlet for a stifled liberationist impulse. While readers and lovers of Shakespeare sort out the truth in between, they can draw inspiration from this production, a show at once uncompromisingly feminist and memorably, violently beautiful.
