Measure for Measure

Company: Company B Belvoir
Venue: Belvoir Street Theatres, Surry Hills, Sydney
Dates: To 25 July 2010

From Benedict Andrews' director's notes in the programme:

A PLAY OF MIRRORS. Measure for Measure is my third Shakespeare staging concerned with the mechanics of power. Julius Caesar (2005) dealt with the theatrics of government, and The War of the Roses (2009) raised the spectres of sovereign power which haunt our concept of society. MEASURE FOR MEASURE looks into the ‘very nerves of state’ where the economies of desire and law interlock.

This Measure for Measure is set in a society much like ours - where pornography has become mainstream, where sex tapes of celebrities are public fodder, where politicians speak in the name of God, where everything is numbered and consumable, where all private lives are under constant surveillance - a control society.

Like Simon Phillips in his recent adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III for the Melbourne Theatre Company, Mr Andrews sets his production in a recognisable contemporary world. This setting (set design: Ralph Myers) looks like a second-string hotel room that has a featured glass walled bathroom to be viewed from the large sized bed (shower, wash sink, mirror and toilet on a tiled floor surface),which, possibly, throws it into the realm of a specialised brothel room - Mistress Overdone's Brothel Conveniences (?!) - two walls of the room are surrounded by a retractable curtain, which does retract to allow us to voyeuristically observe all the activities that take place in there. It is on a revolve that spins about, at different rates of speed, to allow different scenes/rooms to be set up and then acted out in (a setting, indeed, for Genet's famous brothel, The Balcony).

The costumes (Dale Ferguson) are ordinary day wear of the time: suits, collar and ties for the government figures, modern religious dress for the nuns and friars, white collar casual working class attire for the office figures, police uniforms and the scungy street wear of the lower levels of the 'underbelly' class of the brothel/street worlds which one might engage within Kings Cross, in Sydney.

This transposition is quickly grasped by the audience and easily accepted. Added to this, Mr Andrews introduces the world of CCTV with hidden cameras behind the bathroom mirror and from the ceiling that projects observational images onto two large screens on either side of the theatre auditorium which simultaneously captures the action in the room (similar to Mr Andrews' 'Big Brother' video affects in his The Season at Sarsparilla). This metaphor of the 'pornography' capture and privacy invasion for the contemporary world of Measure for Measure is instantly communicated.

But further complication to this idea is suggested by the addition of a live video camera team, taken by the actors when not in character, that captures for the wall screens, close up and hand held invasions of the characters lives. Is it a layer where the characters/actors are narcissistically filming themselves in an intense exercise of intimacy for the audience to get ‘up close and personal’? To come to the cinematic closeness of the moments of moral decisions? To...? I was in a dilemma of comprehending this extra step to the ideas of the production.

This was for me the easiest of Mr Andrews' adaptations of the classics to observe and absorb. There was, in retrospect, two productions being explored and experienced.

The first, which is an adapted reading of Shakespeare's text was a relative success. In Mr Andrews' adaptation, most of the low comedy of the play has been removed. The comic scenes between Escalus (Frank Whitten), the Provost (Steve Rodgers) and the brothel world of Pompey (Arky Michael), Elbow (Ashley Lyons), Mistress Overdone (Helen Thompson) and Froth (completely excised) and that of the prison with Abhorson (Ashley Lyons) and Barnadine (Colin Moody) is truncated and reduced to mere functional need of the director's intentions.

The focus-intention is on the moral dilemmas of the principal characters of the play: Angelo (Damon Gameau), Claudio (Chris Ryan) and Isabella (Robin McLeavy) brought on by the strange vicissitudes and consequent behaviour of the ruler of this city of Vienna, the Duke Vincentio (Robert Menzies), and further the ‘fantastic’ Lucio (Toby Schmitz), and compliant Mariana (Helen Thompson).

Note: the following paragraphs quote extensively from Norrie Epstein’s “Friendly Shakespeare” Penguin Books, 1993

Measure for Measure along with All's Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida are often termed the “problem plays”. “Although grouped with the comedies (of Shakespeare) in the First Folio, they are pungent satires on human vice, sexuality, folly and greed.” What we call ‘black comedies’, “because they make us laugh at what we would normally find distasteful.” As the low life comedy of the Pompey - Mistress Overdone- Elbow world has been taken away, this production focuses on the realism and “explicit portrayal of infidelity, sexual dishonesty, and civic corruption” amongst the ‘ruling’ and middle class, and with clinical detachment reveals the more unsavoury side of our human nature. Shakespeare offers no clear-cut answers to the social problems he presents in these plays. In fact, they mostly finish without resolution. So is it here with Measure for Measure. The final marriage proposal by the Duke famously, notoriously problematic. “The atmosphere of these plays (the so-called problem plays) is naturalistic, lacking the transcendent good humour of comedy and the cosmic redemption of tragedy.”

In this production of Measure for Measure the setting is crassly wordly and profane. The world is starkly realistic, the interpolated (and lengthy) scene of the ‘trashing’ of Abhorson, with shit and blood, and then the room/cell (recollection of scenes from the Steve McQueen film Hunger and Nicholas Wilding Refn's film Bronson came flooding back; although Mr Moody, for my money, was no comparison to the Tom Hardy character) a case in point; "there is no magical Illyria or Forest of Arden here. The Vienna of Measure for Measure is a portrait of urban blight, a place where officials are no different to the underworld of pimps, whores, and thieves." But "finally, though the play depicts an amoral world, (it) is not lacking in moral standards. By exposing some of the worst of human existence, it holds a corrective mirror up to our (recognisable) vices and like all satires, (it) is tacitly based upon a moral ideal, which though it exists in theory is consistently ignored in practice."

Mr Andrews in his notes to the production concludes, he “love(s) (the play) for the problems it poses - formally and theatrically and especially morally. It's a scathing and relentless inquiry into questions of law and transgression, of authority and desire, of death and justice.(He) considers it a psycho-sexual-political-thriller for our times.” This he mostly deliver: “A look into the ‘very nerves of state’ where the economies of desire and law interlock.”

Shakespeare and all the cast are triumphant here. All the cast (however underused, except as camera crew).

Mr Menzies, Ryan, Schmitz, Gameau, Ms Thompson and McLeavy are especially erudite in the textual clarity of their responsibilities (although, all are assisted with attached microphones).

The second production concerns the use of a hand-held video camera used by the cast to capture images that are constantly relayed onto the two large screens, one either side of the auditorium (video designer & operator, Sean Bacon). The play is told twice. One actual and one mediated through the eye of the camera. In my experience of the performance, having purchased a ticket that sat me in the front row of the central block of the theatre, neither the actual or the mediated performance was satisfactory. Physically it was difficult, twisting either way to catch the images, let alone dramatically, experientially.

For instance, the great central scene of the play between Isabella and her brother Claudio (Act III, Scene 1), on which the play turns, rich in its poetry and shifting argument, was actually staged in a dark corner of the bathroom of the set, the lighting to the room having been turned off, both characters crouched low to the ground, with another actor masking bodily, holding a video camera close to the faces of the protagonists with a special blue light switched on at the camera lens. To be able to participate with the scene in its urgent and pregnant moments, it was necessary to watch the images on the screen that had been doctored to give the impression of a low budget scratchy image that recalled the urgency of most of the feature film The Blair Witch Project (1999) - a quasi documentary. Choosing between watching the masked actual performance or the mediated stylised images up on the walls, became a distancing and unsatisfactory task. The actors having to mediate and express the dilemmas of the play either for camera or theatre. The heightened language and action reduced to small screen-scale dimensions. The play lost out. The actors lost out and I, the audience, lost out. Ultimately. Unlike the contemporary world found by the Company in Melbourne for their take of Richard III - where the acting choices fulfilled the theatrical thrill possible in the Shakespearean text whilst balanced neatly in the vibe of the now world.

Later, the long and convoluted fifth act of the play was played with a camera crew of actors, often standing in front of the actors attempting to explicate the plays unravelling. It was like being an observer of a film set. The close up images on the screens were hand held and 'jumpy', not always clear for the dramatic moments (David Stratton would have been apoplectic!).

These are just two instances where the exploration that Mr Andrews was making with this sometimes dominating experiment in vision obfuscated or diminished the dramatic potential of the material of the play as a theatre work.

Just what was the purpose of it? Many more questions could be posed. Cynically, my last one might be: Was it simply just the urge of a frustrated would-be film-maker?

There is in the program a long (12 columns,6 pages) academic essay by Giorgio Agamben, 'The Face'. Mr Agamben is a contemporary Italian Philosopher. If the essay is present to help me to comprehend the wherewithal of the video technique exploration by the director or any other aspect of the production, it needs to be written in an English that is plainer. I have made several attempts at it and sadly, humiliatingly gave up. I am not alone, I have been told.

All in all then, the play does survive, mostly due to the expertise of the actors. I speak from a very complicated association of this "problem" play. I have seen this play many times, John Bell's production in the early seventies at Nimrod Street with Garry McDonald, Michael Long and Anna Volska; Richard Brooks production at the Q Theatre out at Penrith in the late seventies; Rex Cramphorn's in the eighties (he had several goes); and also productions by Richard Cotterell and Aubrey Mellor. Maybe the filtering through this knowledge kept me able in attending to the choices of the actors at Belvoir St.

These adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, Richard III and Measure for Measure, by two of Australia's leading directors, Simon Phillips and Benedict Andrews have been interesting journeys this year. One was a near masterpiece, the other an obfuscated experiment, both spinning on a revolve, a whirligig in time. Soon the Bell Shakespeare will give us a Twelfth Night. More to savour from this great contemporary playwright - the most produced playwright of the year!

REFERENCES:
Norrie Epstein, ‘Friendly Shakespeare’, (1993) Penguin Books, New York, 1993.

Kevin Jackson

To read more of Kevin Jackson's theatre reviews, check out his blog at Kevin Jackson's Theatre Reviews.