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.
(Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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.
(Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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.
(Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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
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