Measure for Measure ★★★★
Is Gregory Doran currently our most accomplished director of anything William Shakespeare wrote for the stage—or is believed to have written? As artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he’s in a good position to jockey for the rating. He can assign himself as many productions as he likes and then do with them what he will (pun intended).
He rarely goes wrong. Indeed, I have yet to see him falter. As a practitioner of reading the play, seeing what it is, and then bringing it to the stage (rather than imposing an oh-so-clever director’s take on it), he’s as never-miss as was the late Peter Hall.
For him, something like the “problem play” Measure for Measure is no problem. And though his approach to it here may not be one of his most scintillating, it’s as lucid a presentation as any partisan of the difficult work’s partisans would hope to encounter.
Of course, the problem of this problem play has to do with the choice novice nun Isabella (Lucy Phelps) makes not to save her condemned brother, Claudio (James Cooney), by sleeping with Angelo (Sandy Grierson), who’s sitting in for the supposedly absent Duke of Vienna (Antony Byrne).
It seems as if in our century (as well as the previous one, at least) Isabella’s stand commands less sympathy than it appears to have done as the 16th century turned into the 17th century. But Shakespeare can’t be expected to have anticipated as much.
So Doran doesn’t worry about finding a way to skirt the problematic dramatic device. As is the custom these days, he does change the period in which it takes place, but he keeps Vienna as the specific locale. Now he and set/costume designer Stephen Brimson Lewis have the characters going about their disturbing business in the late 19th century.
Which isn’t to say that Doran doesn’t introduce a few surprises that Shakespeare’s lines can support. One of the best occurs at the very end when the Duke has shed his disguise as the helpful Friar who’d been hanging around to watch how Angelo is comporting himself. The alteration involves the Duke’s offer of marriage to the steadfast Isabella. Watch for the jolly moment.
As Doran wants his actors speaking their lines trippingly, clearly, and emotionally on the tongue, that’s how they all respond. Byrne’s Duke is the most prominent, and Byrne lives up to the wisdom and understanding built into the man. (As Friar, he circulates rather often with his friar’s hood pulled back, which does make an observer wonder why more of his subjects don’t recognize him.)
Incidentally, one benefit of the production’s excellence is that the insistence of the title as binding may not always be appropriate—i.e., that one measure must be met by an absolutely equal measure. It’s a dollop of wisdom Shakespeare acquired in his later years that certainly pertained then and still does today.
Measure for Measure opened October 10, 2019, at the Barbican (London) and runs through January 16, 2020. Tickets and information: barbican.org.uk
Groan Ups ★★★
The Mischief Company—which opened The Play That Goes Wrong here in London in 2015 and still has it on here as well as in New York City and who-knows-where-else—is at it again with the latest bundle. It’s the cutely titled Groan Ups, which doesn’t go wrong but doesn’t altogether go right, either. Something sort of in the middle.
Perhaps the difference has to do with this new one being a comedy rather than a farce, for which Mystery Company writers Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields seemingly have a greater penchant. (For further substantiation see also their Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Comedy About a Bank Robbery.) Actually, the first act of the newie is all-out comedy. In the second half the funny men veer even more in a new direction—comedy-drama, which does work to some extent.
Maybe the change was motivated by the authors wanting a change of pace, because whenever they write, they always shape showy roles for themselves, and this time out they had the urge to stretch their God-given talents.
Whatever the impetus, they’ve hoisted a piece that takes place in 2004 and 2019 in the same Bloomfield school room. When first spotted, Lewis, Sayer and Shields, are, respectively, a lardy bloke of indeterminate smarts called Spencer, an insecure and groveling chap called Simon, and a schemer of uncertain sexuality called Archie. They’re 14, as are the girls for whom their adolescent hormones are boiling—Katie (Charlie Russell) and Moon (Nancy Zamit). Throughout the act they behave exactly as unsupervised teens do during the annoying phase: insulting each other, ganging up in shifting alliances, uneasily expressing attractions to one another. That’s to say, with flaming social stupidity.
OK, that’s the first act, which does rave on longer than necessary. In the second act, they’re back in the same, only mildly changed room. They’re 29-year-olds, whose lives have not turned out to be what they expected (although they never did get around to expressing their expectations). Katie and Archie are not too happily married. Spencer is an unmarried pet store worker. Moon has tied the knot with (unseen) Mark. Simon, still ruminating on his grade-school treatment, has hired an actress he’s dubbed Chemise (Bryony Corrigan) to impersonate his sultry wife.
Barely have the five announced how glad they are to see each other than past resentments surface. While an unknown class member appears—saying he’s Paul (Dave Hearn) and upset no one remembers him—Katie and Moon reveal their long mutual dislike. Archie and Katie relive their earlier crush on each other. Simon makes a bigger fool of himself than he ever has and eventually threatens suicide. Archie and Spencer also come to metaphorical sword’s point over an almost long-forgotten exam Spencer supposedly failed.
The Lewis-Sayer-Shields tone-change comes a bit late to be entirely convincing, but—developed as a running (visual) gag about a dead hamster runs is played out—it’s forgivable. The denouement sequence does include a line worthy of the most serious tragedy you might imagine. As they resolve their brief classroom encounter Spencer says to Katie, “They’re beautiful, aren’t they—the lives we don’t live.”
Director Kirsty Patrick Ward handles the bright and darker folderol well, with yeoman-like help from set designer Fly Davis, costume designer Roberto Surace, lighting designer Christopher Nairne, and sound designer Alexandra Faye Braithwaite. So by curtain call—which is vivaciously enhanced by a hot rock song the cast delivers—there’s anything but a valid reason for genuine groaning.
Groan Ups opened September 27, 2019, at the Vaudeville Theatre and runs through December 1. Tickets and information: groan-ups.com
