THEATRE REVIEW: MEASURE FOR MEASURE


Pictured: Carmen Grant, Tom Rooney

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to LFPress
30 MAY 2013
R: 3/5

STRATFORD - Half horror story, half fairy tale — taking the measure of Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE has never been easy. In fact, it’s would seem to be increasingly more difficult in the face of evolving social and sexual mores. And sadly, the production that opened on the stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre Wednesday doesn’t shed much new light on the tough topics Shakespeare tackles.

Director Martha Henry, the former Grand Theatre artistic director, struggles to avoid the social pitfalls hidden in the script while embracing its pratfalls in the apparent faint hope that they might serve to mitigate any social offence which might be given in the playing. Most of that offence can be found in the relationship between Angelo (Tom Rooney), lieutenant to Vienna’s masquerading and peripatetic Duke Vincento (Geraint Wyn Davies).

A smitten Angelo uses his master’s power to forcibly seduce — rape, by today’s standards — Isabella (Carmen Grant), a crime rendered all the more reprehensible by the fact that she has just entered a convent and is preparing to take her vows when she discovers her brother Claudio (Christopher Prentice) about to be executed at Angelo’s hand for immoral behaviour — unless, ironically, she succumbs to his captor’s demands.

By today’s lights, it all adds up to a shocking bit of misogyny, buried here under a bushel of black comedy, but rendered even more offensively creepy by the fact that Rooney, in a from-the-neck-up performance, appears to be just about as attracted to Grant as Romeo is to Juliet in the oddly sexless production of R&J which launched the season earlier this week. Stratford’s Shakespeare this season appears to be most assuredly unmanned.

In the role of the Duke, Wyn Davies does his best to redeem the gender, playing his role with a familiar puckish charm — a seeming innocent abroad in high heels and cassock in the dark and steamy underbelly of Vienna, as painted by designer John Pennoyer in often lurid shades seemingly borrowed from a colourized film noir. And while there a re some truly fine performances — Stephen Ouimette takes a graceful comedic turn as the opportunistic Lucio while Randy Hughson politely dines out on the scenery as the amoral Pompey in work reflected in polished performances from Peter Hutt, Nigel Bennett, Stephen Russell and the aforementioned Prentice.

But Henry nonetheless establishes herself as just a director who can’t say no, allowing Brian Tree and Patricia Collins to run seriously amok. Tree’s Elbow is more marionette than martinet, while Collins’ Mistress Overdone would more accurately be named Mistress Overacted and they both get in the way of the tale without furthering it.

In the end, Henry at least does a credible job of finding a through line and following it from beginning to end. But though she manages to find certain lovely (if not always appropriate) notes of whimsy along the way, she fails to find a heart beating at the core of the story. And finally it is only by that heart that success can be measured.