Measure for Measure

The publicity promised this production would be “unlike any Shakespeare you will ever have seen before”; a bold claim (although it’s a reasonable assumption that no-one in The Sinodun Players’ audience will have witnessed a similar production that was apparently staged in America).  Shakespeare’s plays, and this one as much as any, have been relentlessly revised and re-interpreted for hundreds of years, so it was more of a relief than a surprise that there was little that was startlingly innovative about this production.  Its strengths lay elsewhere: the decision to keep the setting as Vienna but move the timeframe to the Anschluss in 1938 was carried through with confidence and conviction, and worked really well; and the verse was spoken with unusual clarity by the majority of the cast so that the narrative drive of the typically convoluted plot came across quite clearly.

A small band, comprising keyboard, clarinet, saxophone and drums, captured time and place perfectly, the music evidently carefully researched to fit both the context and the era of the production.  There was some incidental music as well as the set-piece numbers in the club, and we might have heard a bit more of this.

The set concept worked really well, with a substantial area upstage reserved for the Duke’s office, and flexible areas downstage employed more generally for the club, the convent, the prison and so forth.  The floor projection of paving stones added texture to the downstage area, while two red vertical banners at the rear of the set evoked a fascist regime.  I particularly liked the slatted nature of the flats, so that comings and goings could be glimpsed behind them, and overheard conversations could be staged persuasively.

The austere mood of the set was reinforced by the use of a cool palette in the lighting design, and the drab tone was carried into the costumes.  Black, white and shades of grey featured prominently, and although the dark hues of the fascists’ uniforms, both civic and military, contrasted with the nuns’ white garb, the costume colours did not totally represent a character’s position on the spectrum of good to evil: the uncompromisingly black cassock of Father Lodowick, admittedly a somewhat conflicted character, saw to that.  The local colour provided by Mistress Overdone and Pompey the tapster was literally reflected in their costumes.

It is important to approach any theatrical production holistically, and the technical details of this interpretation had certainly been well thought through.  Ultimately though, it is the quality of the performances on stage that matters most, and the director certainly brought the best out of his talented and well-cast company.  Characters were clearly defined, the verse was spoken well, and there was rhythm and momentum to the narrative without anything ever seeming rushed, or lines being spoken over each other as is often required in more contemporary works.  The director was fortunate in having a core of experienced performers who clearly knew how to lift Shakespeare’s words off the page, but he drew decent performances out of the less experienced actors, and the result was a compelling and alarmingly relevant piece of theatre which held the audience throughout.

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