Measure for Measure
Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
QUOTING Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, the annual Bard in the Botanics festival of classical theatre titles its 2024 season “Her Infinite Variety”. It’s an appropriate moniker for a series of dramas (including Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor) that boast a diverse and brilliant series of female protagonists.
Few are more fascinating than Isabella, the female lead in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. A novice nun in the Roman Catholic Church in Vienna, she finds herself the unwilling subject of the authoritarianism, opportunism and rank hypocrisy of Angelo, the punitive and puritanical deputy to Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna.
No sooner has the Duke left the city in Angelo’s hands than the pious deputy declares war on sex outside marriage, starting with a death sentence on Isabella’s brother Claudio, who has impregnated his beloved fiancée.
His austere rule thus established, the seemingly devout Angelo offers Isabella an appalling, private bargain. The deputy will, he tells her, spare her brother’s life if she surrenders her virginity to him.
The drama that ensues (in the Kibble Palace glasshouse) combines horribly tortured and conflicting emotions with outrageously cynical and self-serving political machinations. It also involves (by way of a mysterious friar who arrived in Vienna at the very moment the Duke left) some very righteous detective work.
This truncated, 100-minute version of the play (which is tightly directed and superbly adapted by Jennifer Dick) is set in the present day. The imagined Viennese state takes as its motto “In God We Trust” (which is the decidedly Gilead-like slogan of the United States of America).
Any parallel with the looming dystopia of a US headed, for a second time, by a professedly Christian, morally corrupt, authoritarian misogynist is, one assumes, entirely intended.
READ MORE: A South Korean sample of tradition coming to Fringe
Dick’s Measure for Measure is powerfully compressed and impressively cogent. Cutting to the chase, the adaptation sees the departing Vincentio appoint Angelo his deputy, and the wretched Claudio stagger, in chains, on to the Kibble’s stone-floored stage in a few, dramatic opening minutes.
From there, the outrages, terrors, fears, anguished disputes and clerical sleuthing come at an absorbing pace. Stephanie McGregor (fresh from her fine performance as Jane Eyre) offers an excellent rendering of Isabella.
Her emotions shifting rapidly between shock at her brother’s plight, disbelief at Angelo’s lascivious abuse of his office and righteous anger at both, McGregor is never less than enthralling. There are equally outstanding performances from Sam Stopford (a snake-like Angelo), James Boal (equally convincing as the terrified Claudio and the spineless apparatchik Escalus) and Graham Mackay-Bruce (marvellously haughty and sarcastic as the wily Vincentio).
Although fabulously intense, Dick’s production is not without humour. For instance, the prison buzzer that sounds whenever there is physical contact between a prisoner and a visitor is used to sometimes hilarious effect.
Heather Grace Currie’s set and costume designs are unfussy and effective (not least in her procurement, for the mystery cleric, of a habit in a particularly nice shade of dark blue).
Until July 27: bardinthebotanics.co.uk
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here