Double Measures (Measure for Measure, Donmar Warehouse, dir. Josie Rourke, Nov 2018)

The pitch for Josie Rourke’s Measure for Measure at the Donmar, as I had understood it, was that half-way through the show, Isabella and Angelo – or rather, Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden – would switch parts. This seemed like an intriguing twist on a long-established theatrical sleight of hand (with a pedigree as old as Gielgud and Olivier in Romeo and Juliet in 1935 and as fresh as Stevenson and Williams in Mary Stuart in 2016; or, if one were in the mood for a theatre-historical deep dive, Garrick and Quin in Richard III at Covent Garden in 1746, sort of). It also seemed an uncommonly daring proposition for a UK production, and one at the Donmar to boot: hotswapping actors in the middle of a show, challenging an audience to accept a new alignment of characters and actors in narrative mid-flow. But of course that’s not what happened at all. Instead, Rourke’s production simply stages Measure for Measure twice, in a heavily cut, breathlessly speedy version: first, in early modern dress, with Atwell’s Isabella as Shakespeare’s novice and Lowden’s Angelo as the Duke’s judicial substitute; then, in contemporary outfits, with Isabella as the substitute and Angelo as someone recently admitted to “The Cloisters” — a rehab facility.

There’s something fantastically misguided about the entire enterprise: the first half feels like a compendium of everything that’s uninteresting about “conventional” English Shakespeare, the second like an anthology of every bad cliché of “modernized” Shakespeare stagings. In its way, the first version almost deserves admiration for its ability to remain as rigorously conventional as it does despite relying on such a brutally cut text: even though the edit is as disrespectful of Shakespeare as any UK production I’ve seen, the staging does almost nothing beyond having the actors say the words, deferring to a stultifying degree to the (truncated) text. It’s an effective enough exercise in “storytelling,” I suppose – it certainly does little more than present a quick sequence of events. Atwell alone is battling the concept: in her performance, there are moments of thought, moments when she tries to slow things down to allow her Isabella to respond physically or emotionally before speaking. Lowden’s Angelo, on the other hand, is so robotic, so entirely unaffected by the situations the play puts him in that I’d be tempted to claim the production portrays him as a psychopath if I could only persuade myself that there were any room for that kind of interpretative investment here. The disconnect between speech and action runs deep: Angelo barely seems to respond to Isabella at all in their first scene; the soliloquy in which he reflects on her effect on him thus feels bizarrely disconnected from the embodied reality we’ve just witnessed. Of course this approach makes the few instances of physical action stand out – Angelo feeling up Isabella’s leg under her novice’s habit, for instance. But those same moments also highlight the sheer emptiness of the rest of the performance.

This first run through the text seems designed to set a kind of baseline, but of course there is no such thing. Acting that simply reproduces text isn’t more pure or less interventionist than other modes of performance. It’s just acting that neglects to do most of the work. For four acts, that first version delivers not a conventional production of Measure for Measure, but a sketch of what such a conventional production might look like – a rough draft at best, an outline, a line-drawing devoid of shading and colour. There are the tiniest hints of something else, something more: when Isabella repeatedly stares at the disguised Duke, for instance (does she half recognize him as someone other than a friar? Or does she sense that he, too, sees her as an object of desire?), or Helena Wilson’s first mute appearance as a Mariana who, in a startling switch out of faux-Renaissance conventionality, copes with the trauma of abandonment by cutting her bare thigh. But that, by and large, is it.

Act five finds a little more room to breathe, though Angelo remains totally detached (which, again, might be a compelling reading if it didn’t make for such utterly uninteresting theatre). But if the scene is allowed to live a little, to go beyond the mere marking that precedes it, that life exists largely in the emotional turmoil of the female characters. The laughter that greets Isabella’s story, Mariana’s profound distress at the prospect of Angelo’s execution, and the apparently complete pointlessness of all that grief: it’s a powerful scene, an almost unbearably cruel scene, and it leaves the Duke looking like an irredeemable monster. Angelo is, as ever, relatively unaffected by it all; it’s the women who bear the emotional brunt of the Duke’s “comedic” scheme, to no apparent purpose whatsoever. Isabella’s reaction to his final proposition comes as a painful relief: a horrified, anguished scream. But that moment also forms the transition to the second version: lights flash, music blares, and suddenly, modern lawyers and people in business suits occupy the stage. And Isabella now is Angelo, standing in the same place he stood in Act 1 before; the Provost drops a folder now in the same spot where he dropped a leather-bound volume earlier. Replay time.

The modern-dress version of the play that unfolds from there manages to remain true to the reduction-to-convention trope the first version established: how do we know we’re in the present? Everyone always has to clutch an iPhone. Also, pimps now are Russian. And that, as far as the audience is concerned, is absolutely hilarious. As, of course, is every ringtone and every text message. Whenever a document gets handed over in the first version, we now get to see (and hear) someone send a text message or (how quaint) an email. And it’s so funny every time it happens. Ever so slightly less conventional: the text now sounds different. The means are simplistic – mainly, there are more glottal stops all of a sudden. But still. The people on stage, mercifully, sound a bit more like people. They pause from time to time. Of course it’s all still terribly rushed, but there’s now a little more time and space for the actors to act. At least a few scenes feel a bit more like situations that are allowed to unfold, and a bit less like indications of what might have been.

The second version, for the most part, is just a better performance than the first. But to the extent that it pretends to be about “now,” it is also much worse. The politics of the first version may have been hard to take, but they felt current; it’s no coincidence, after all, that a Google search for “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” brings up multiple articles about the Kavanaugh hearings on the first page of results. The politics of the second half, on the other hand, quickly turn reactionary. Not only does the Isabella/Angelo switch imply a #mentoo logic (it’s power, not gender, that turns the substitute into a sexual predator, you see). Official state power bent on suppressing free erotic play is now also exclusively female: Helena Wilson now plays the Justice who drags Claudio off to prison. Women destroy sex in this version (unless they’re Russian, in which case they monetize it). And what happens to the Duke, now that Angelo is in Isabella’s place? He turns gay – which could, of course, be interesting, but here simply means that he’s that much more predatory, turning a hug of consolation after Claudio’s supposed execution into a kiss (which, distressingly, got a big laugh from the audience). In the final scene, this Angelo is brought back on in handcuffs, adding an extra level of creepiness to the Duke’s first proposition (“Give me your hand and say you will be mine:/He is my brother too. But fitter time for that.”). Again, this could have been interesting if the production had taken any care to think through the power relations between these people, and how sexuality might complicate them. In the absence of such thought, though, sexuality simply becomes a stand-in for religious boundaries: the Duke’s transgression is not that he disregards Isabella’s holy vows but that he ignores Angelo’s sexual orientation; and unlike straight male power, homosexual male power expresses itself in immediately physical ways. The straight Duke talks and finally touches; the queer one paws, kisses, and handcuffs. This casual homophobia finds a neat partner in what happens to Claudio, played by the sole black actor in the cast: it’s one thing to hear that his “sin’s not accidental, but a trade” in the faux-Renaissance version; it’s quite another to hear it in modern dress, spoken to a black man in an orange prison outfit, a black man whom we first encounter as an oversexed player type. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking up and investigating such stereotypes in a performance, but that particular stereotype is Othello’s, not Measure for Measure’s; if a production wants to import it into this play, it better do so with purpose. Here, it doesn’t even feel careless – it feels as though no-one noticed that there might be a problem.

Given the production’s ostensible interest in working with comparisons, it is striking how little it makes of contrasts, and how often it deals in false equivalencies. Take Mariana: the tragic, self-harming figure of the first version becomes an emblem of mopey male pathos in the second; the traumatized woman uses the same knife to peel apples and to cut their thigh; the traumatized man leaves voicemails and turns to self-actualization as an artist and sketches the same apples. It’s a contrast, to be sure, but not one that gets explored at all. What does it mean? Why is it there? It gets a laugh, but that can’t be its purpose. The contrasts range in effect from vapid, as here, to troubling, as in the Duke’s case. The equivalencies are considerably worse. Some just feel like missed opportunities: Angelo, in the second version, responds to the news of his brother’s execution more or less the same way Isabella did in the first – with anguish, but not with rage. Male anger, it appears, is just like female anger; there seems to be no link between gender and aggression worth exploring. With Isabella, though, equivalence becomes a lie. “Who will believe thee, Angelo?” is simply not the same question, in 2018, as “who will believe thee, Isabel.” Most disturbingly, the production suggests that all it takes to undermine his claims would be Isabella’s tears – that’s the “vouch” she proposes to set against his “accusation”. She plays it out, too, with professionally delivered fake tears.

What’s the point of this? It can’t possibly be Rourke’s goal to argue that whereas in the past, women’s words weren’t believed if a man spoke out against them, nowadays women’s words (and tears) routinely and easily trump an innocent man’s protestations. But that is what the scene – especially when paired with the same scene in the first version – seems to suggest. That is the bizarre irony of this production: that its “modern” take on the material ends up more reactionary than its sketch of a conventionally costumed version. If the finale of that first version seems devastatingly current, everything that follows just revels in caricature and false equivalence. But it’s worse than that. The production does not simply put a male powerful transgressor side by side with a female powerful transgressor (and a male heterosexual with a male homosexual transgressor, too). In its costuming, it seems to place one version, in which women are consistently victimized, resolutely in the past, suggesting instead that now, in our modern age, women get to victimize with impunity – and that the experience of being disregarded, denied credibility, ignored and written off, is now gender-neutral. Having demonstrated the abiding power of the play’s final scene in its seventeenth-century gender dynamics, the production then seems determined to claim that those dynamics no longer apply. Why? (And why then end the final scene in the modern version with an abrupt switch, right after the Duke’s first proposition, to Isabella re-entering in her early modern novice’s habit, kneeling down and swearing obedience to the Duke? Has nothing changed after all? And the entire modern 80 minutes might as well have been cut?)

Ultimately, though, I don’t think the show’s profoundest failure is its political wrongheadedness. Its theatrical oddity trumps that. Why, after all, is there a need to demonstrate what a conventional Measure for Measure looks like? Surely one advantage of working on a classic is that the baseline the first version seems designed to set already exists. And if your audience has no experience of conventional productions, a rushed sketch of one is insufficient to fill in that gap. Worse, by putting the old and the modern side by side, the modern becomes funny – as if it’s somehow wrong, somehow parodic to take an old text and put it in a new context. Worst of all, though, the “let’s do two shows in one evening” approach means that there’s neither time nor space for either show. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true in rehearsal as well. Nothing gets to unfold. Everything is signaled, penciled in, stated – nothing develops and little is seen. Very few of the dramatic situations get to play out; Act 5 in the first version does get to unfold for a bit, and promptly gains a theatrical power no other moment in the show can reach. But that’s not a good thing, politics aside. It’s little more than a reminder that either half of the production might have been a worthwhile effort, if the director had given herself and her actors time and space to work and to think. Without that, this Measure for Measure is not just a conceptual muddle and a politically brutally naïve exercise: it’s terribly mediocre theatre.