Measure for Measure
2015: Dominic Dromgoole

This is another of Dominic Dromgoole’s productions at the Globe. He also did Julius Caesar (2015), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014), Henry V (2013), Henry IV, Part 1 (2010), Henry IV, Part 2 (2010), and Romeo and Juliet (2010). It follows the pattern of his other comedies, in particular in being over-burdened with stage silliness. He seems to believe that all of the salacious subtext of the play — and there certainly is some — requires to be enacted in a laugh riot of bawdy gesticulation and body humor. As with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there’s a deal too much of this, to the point that it undermines the unfolding of scenes. The actors’ delivery of their lines is almost incidental to the posturing and mugging of other actors on the side of the scene. People — especially Mistress Overdone — are dragged on, off, and around the stage with much bellowing and howling.

The Duke lacks the depth of Kenneth Colley’s performance, but for most of his lines he is generally under control. His interactions with Lucio are fraught with explosive outbursts that seem almost entirely unmotivated. He delivers a number of his lines too quickly, playing them for comic effect. There is nothing particularly comical about the following lines: they are merely necessary to explain the unfolding of the plot. Rowan, however, rattles them out at an increasingly desperate pace:

The contents of this is the return of the duke: you
shall anon over-read it at your pleasure; where you
shall find, within these two days he will be here.
This is a thing that Angelo knows not; for he this
very day receives letters of strange tenor;
perchance of the duke’s death; perchance entering
into some monastery; but, by chance, nothing of what
is writ. Look, the unfolding star calls up the
shepherd. Put not yourself into amazement how these
things should be: all difficulties are but easy
when they are known. Call your executioner, and off
with Barnardine’s head: I will give him a present
shrift and advise him for a better place. Yet you
are amazed; but this shall absolutely resolve you.
Come away; it is almost clear dawn.

Given a speech like this, why is it funny — or why would one want it to be? The entire audience is laughing at them, certainly. But apparently they’re ready to laugh at just about anything. They are laughing at the performance, though — effectively mocking the play — rather than laughing in response to any humor intrinsic to the play. There’s a difference.

To large extent, the Duke seems to be improvising his actions and his stories most of the time — and seeming ironically clumsy and an object of ridicule. He seems to be seen chiefly as a comic figure, a fortunate buffoon who stumbles into an effective strategy for solving the problem he is confronting. As with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is a good deal too much of the sly embarrassment and nudge-wink sensibility, in which we are encouraged to view the entire play ironically. I don’t think that that’s how it’s intended.

There are other infelicities with other characters as well. When Barnardine says:

Friar, not I — I have been drinking hard all night,
and I will have more time to prepare me, or they
shall beat out my brains with billets: I will not
consent to die this day, that’s certain.

...he repeats “I shall not consent to die this day” over and over, to the clamorous approbation of the other prisoners, as if he were leading cheers at a political rally.

There are of course some rather comical scenes in the play. None of this is a surprise, I suspect. The scenes with Pompey and Elbow are laden with malapropisms and solecisms, and are are quite amusing, when their terms are not being overwhelmed by a wash of antics. Allowing Shakespeare’s largely verbal humor to stand for itself would be a good deal more useful than pouring a gush of laughing elixir over everything.

Lucio is almost always ridiculous, but here he’s more than normally so. Some of that is certainly tolerable, and Brendan O’Hea’s performance fills the absurdity quota satisfactorily, but it takes it from being a kind of humor that proceeds from the character of Lucio into a kind of nudge-wink banter between the performers and the audience. O’Hea’s Austin Powers gesticulation gets a roar from the audience, but it’s a cheap laugh.

As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the musical score is a fusion of Elizabethan music and trombone jazz rendered up on a sackbut. The jazz is once again a sly ironic overtone in a production that has long since ceased to be anything more than a parody of Shakespeare.

The redeeming element of this production is in the paired performances of Isabella and Angelo. Both are in good form and deliver varied and subtle performances. Isabella’s range in particular is fully sufficient reason to watch the performance. Unlike the Duke’s apparently unmotivated moments of apoplexy, Isabella’s lines seem to come from a deeper, more rational source. Some critics found her performance unpersuasive; I did not. She conjures depths of credibility and genuine pain that bespeak the actual character of Isabella and the situation in which she finds herself. Angelo, too, is caught on his own horror at his own degradation, and we can actually sense his world spinning out of control.

Mariana, too, carries her role with surprising dignity, in the midst of a play that has been converted, as much as Dromgoole has been able to make it, into a farce.

Overall, this is a fast, funny, and very disappointing performance of the play with some outstanding moments. It’s not nearly as bad as all of the others I’ve seen except for the BBC version, which is the gold standard, for my money, and remains by a long way the version of choice, especially for new viewers.

Buy the play at Amazon.