Usually listed rather uneasily as a comedy, Measure for Measure is actually a pretty serious play although it descends close to farce in Acts 4 and 5, which is why it’s often dubbed a “problem play”.
Blanche McIntyre’s 1970s-set version plays it for laughs. Her cast of eight (there’s some very accomplished doubling) squeeze every possible innuendo and comic reaction from the text which is adeptly cut with the addition of a line here and there or a changed word to make sure the story telling is as clear as it could be.
But sometimes the laughter grates. This play is, at heart, about the attempt of a political leader to use his power to seduce a young girl, while at the same time ruthlessly condemning (to death) others who “fornicate”. There’s nothing funny about that. The hypocrisy rings hideously, topically true. And there are some horribly familiar attitudes: “See that she has needful but not lavish means” says Angelo, coldly, of the heavily pregnant Juliet reminding me, on this occasion of many people’s attitudes to cold, wet migrants on beaches.
Hattie Ladbury makes a good unambiguously female Duke. Tall and cadaverous in appearance, intense and unsmiling she manipulates other people like a puppet master although it is, as ever, a puzzle why she puts Angelo in charge, thereby putting the welfare of so many people at risk given what she knows of his background.
Georgia Landers’s Isabella is warmly righteous and fluent in her pleas for her brother’s life, but she doesn’t quite bring out the unconscious eroticism of her lines and it’s hard to see quite why Angelo suddenly feels he must have her virginity.
In a strong cast, Eloise Secker stands out as Pompey, flirting with the audience with insouciant insolence. She gives him a sense of undaunted wisdom which doesn’t always come through. Secker also gives us a wan, wistful Mariana looking like a young Diana, Princess of Wales – all blonde bob and hurt.
Although it’s an entertaining evening, this account of the play – and maybe that’s the essence of theatre – asks more questions than it answers. I liked the ending, however, in which ambiguity, incongruity and indecision are built into the text. Both Ladbury and Landers drive that home with eloquent facial expression.
Review by Susan Elkin