Last night I attended the first night of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Durham Assembly Rooms Theatre, a production by the Durham University Classical Theatre society.
It’s a beautiful theatre. The set (above) was excellent, although I wondered why they bothered to drape the desk and candlesticks with fake cobwebs in the interval: not that much time had elapsed.
Isabella (Alannah O’Hare) played her lead role very well. She spoke clearly and carefully and took the audience with her through her moral dilemmas. George Gibbs as Lurcio was a natural clown, hamming it up delightfully, though he rather rushed his longer speeches. And Angelo (Ollie Cochran) made me feel something of his dilemma: he knew he was behaving badly, hypocritically, but he couldn’t fight his base desires. The key scenes are between Angelo and Isabella and most of the emotion was brought out successfully. Claudio (Tom Corcoran) also rose to the challenge of the wonderful scene in which he initially accepts that his sister’s chastity is more important than his life and then, realising the horrors of death, starts begging her to sacrifice herself for him. But some of the other actors spoke too fast. I suspect they were nervous. They pronounced each word carefully, but this is a tricky play with complex concepts and an actor needs to take their time, explaining the language using gestures and emphases and pauses and some of the nuances must have been lost on anyone who was not conversant with the text.
The entire performance lasted just over an hour and a half, not including the interval.
M4M is a difficult play to do well but when it is done well it can be magical. The scene described above is one of the wonderful moments but there are others, such as when Angelo makes his offer to Isabella, and when Isabella tries to balance her virginity against her brother’s death. But the play leaves many moral questions unasked. Isabella won’t sacrifice her own chastity for her brother ... but is perfectly willing to persuade Mariana to sleep with Angelo as part of the famous ‘bed trick’; is not that hypocrisy in Isabella? Why is the Duke prepared to leave Vienna in Angelo’s care, a man he knows to be flawed, especially when he has ‘set him up’ by openly acknowledging that he himself has been lax enforcing the laws which he now urges Angelo to crack down on? And why oh why does he tell Isabella that Claudio has been killed? Is it a test? Does he think that causing her distress is a good way to woo her?
These are knotty moral problems. They need careful handling. This is a text which cannot be rushed.
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