Sexual politics unraveled: Measure for Measure at the Union Theatre

The Steam Industry presents an innovative approach to a well-loved piece. It’s clever, looks gorgeous and only just falls short of being an unmissable production. At the Union Theatre.

Shakespeare’s problem plays are neither comedy or tragedy, and they always feel like a bit of a mixed bag. In Measure for Measure, the Duke of Vienna goes away on leave and entrusts his deputy Angelo with enforcing dormant laws. Barely in office, Angelo begins to rid the city of scum and moral decay. One of the early accused is Claudio, who got his fiancé Julietta pregnant out of wedlock. He is to be beheaded as punishment, and it seems only the pleading of his virgin sister Isabella manages to pierce Angelo’s unrelenting shell. There is a catch, of course; only if she, who is preparing to become a nun, gives herself to Angelo, will he consider releasing the brother. When Isabella goes to tell her brother about the situation, she is sure he will agree that his death will be preferable over such a degrading act. What a surprise – she has to think again.

The story, of course, is so much more intricate than that, and there are secret letter exchanges and disguised friars in abundance. But the main issue stands: the idea that women are regularly sacrificed by men to save themselves, to make a point about frailty and morality or for mere entertainment has not been passed up from Shakespeare’s times.

Today’s level of awareness about various issues – inequality in payment or the normality of female objectification – are only ever slightly raised by such admirable campaigns as SayNoToPageThree. Director Phil Willmott is certainly very aware of how the sexual politics have changed throughout the centuries, but also how some patterns still remain solidly misogynistic. What, then, do you do with a text that essentially uses marriage as punishment for wrongdoers?

How about letting the audience walk straight into a brothel, greet it with the voluptuous Pompeia (Natalie Harman in a strong performance), and seduce it to look right at the debauchery? And why not then lead it away to a court room to be witness to a trial about moral decay? Supported by a partly promenade approach and a gorgeous moving cage-like set structure by Phil Lindley, it’s an innovative use of the space. When it elegantly disperses focus, Miguel Vicente’s light design in particular contributes to that spatial seduction.

Towards the end in a nightclub scene, the production finds some intelligent and visually strong solutions to suggest a shift in power between the sexes. There are other very strong motives evoked by set and costume (Philippa Batt) that place the production in a vaguely fascist society. This comments on a lot of recent issues in the media, and highlights the devastating effects seemingly arbitrary political decisions have on regular people’s lives.

The scope of the production asks a lot of the 14 performers, and sadly they can only partially keep up with the challenge. It is a shame that Daisy Ward’s holier-than-thou Isabella can’t quite carry the weight of that responsibility and struggles to match Paul Critoph’s strong performance of the conflicted enforcer Angelo. From the first moment onwards it is Rikki Lawton who hits the nail of the production right on the head with his cheeky lawyer Lucio. His banter with Nicholas Osmond’s Duke is comedic relief in the more anaemic and laborious stretches of the production.

When cutting down Shakespeare texts it’s always hard to get the balance just right, and so there are some performers you’d just like to see more of. Laura Webb as Juliet, for example, is underused, as is Richard Franklin as the Provost. Dermot Dolan’s constable Elbow, with his richness of malapropisms and his interplay with Brian Eastty, is not as funny as he should be.

If you’re ready to overlook these kind of things it’s an exciting take on Shakespeare that comes with a lot of vision and many things to like about. Deserves seeing.

Waiting on jokes: A Bit of A Hitch/Waiting on Shakespeare at the Courtyard Theatre

Writer-director Michael Harry takes on two of the greatest British storytellers, one classic and one more recent, to create homages that throws their characters into the deep end and drown them in a sea of knowing references and silly costumes. At the Courtyard Theatre.

Silly slapstick, knowing glances and audience interaction make the perfect recipe for light evening entertainment, and these two comedy shows have their random setting cranked up to very high. Unfortunately, bad wigs alone don’t make a good screwball comedy. Having toured the productions for months and months, the English Theatre Company now offer A Bitch of a Hitch and Waiting on Shakespeare on alternating days in this Hoxton venue.

In the Hitchcock piece, a young history teacher gets tangled up in all kinds of dodgy business by following a husky femme fatale (Amy Berry) into a club. What follows is a lengthy string of Hitchcock references (Birds: check, MacGuffin: check, Psycho shower: check) and people running off-stage to change their wig or costume.

The jokes are hit and miss, but in general the problem with the production is certainly not the irreverence of the material, but a fundamental disconnection to the subtleties of the referenced material. You just don’t see the master of suspense ever trying this hard. The performers cannot be blamed, they are throwing themselves into the flimsy material trying to rescue whatever there is, especially Nick Potts, who gives a very physical performance as the teacher who faces villains and shoot-outs. Joshua Stuart Mills plays more characters than fit on an average sized notepad and has impeccable comedic timing.

It’s strange because the ingredients for a funny show are basically there, but it just doesn’t come together as well as it needs to. Ultimately, there is enough material for an entertaining 25 minute show, but stretched out to well over 80 minutes it just gets a bit tedious: an evening with The 39 Steps is certainly to be favoured over this production.

Directed by Christopher Jeffries, the following Shakespearean twist on Waiting for Godot feels more fluid, and there is a great deal more to like about it. A time-travelling thief wakes up in the Globe to mess around with the rehearsals of famous Chamberlain’s Men Will Kempe and Richard Burbage. The two squabble about what show to put on for the Queen and their boss, Shakespeare himself, still hasn’t showed up. As setups go this is again fairly random: why a thief from our time? No one in Waiting on Shakespeare knows, and it’s just not wacky enough not to question its coherence. There is more squabbling and heaps and heaps of references, and a lengthy Hamlet re-enaction with the audience playing key characters.

All of this on its own is mildly amusing, but due to a lack of coherent frame it just seems to be leading nowhere. This kind of show is Reduced Shakespeare Company territory, and they have a much more secure grasp on style and tone to create humour out of a richness of textual references. Clocking in at around 85 minutes the show, has the same flaw as A Bit of A Hitch.

The result is never as suspenseful as Hitchcock or as poignant and funny as Shakespeare which, considering the potential, is a right shame.

BBC Radio 4: Shakespeare is German

This is the 2012 radio programme on BBC Radio 4 for which I interviewed Thomas Ostermeier (Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz) in Berlin. I also production managed and researched the programme for the production company (Pacificus).

Here is the link to the programme page on the BBC website. It was part of a series of events and programmes Patrick Spottiswoode, the director of Shakespeare’s Globe Education, facilitated over a couple of years exploring the relationship of Germany and Shakespeare. Lyn Gardner wrote a lovely piece about the history of Germany’s fascination with Shakespeare and the Globe programme here.

The Banality of Evil: The Hothouse at Trafalgar Studios

It takes a masterful playwright and confident direction to turn a dark tale about the abuse of power into a funny and entertaining romp. The new production of The Hothouse at Trafalgar Transformed only just stops short of dunking Pinter’s piece into custard and pie. The result is uncomfortably chilling, twisted and a joy to watch.

[![John Simm (Gibbs) & Simon Russell Beale (Roote) © Johan Persson.jpg](https://d23f6h5jpj26xu.cloudfront.net/8wi7z4d7uy7vcw_small.jpg)](http://img.svbtle.com/8wi7z4d7uy7vcw.jpg)
>John Simm (Gibbs) & Simon Russell Beale (Roote) © Johan Persson

As with his Macbeth earlier this year, director Jamie Lloyd skilfully manoeuvres the production with a stylistically consistent hand. Instead of spit, gore and blood, this time around the direction heightens Pinter’s virtuous language and absurd monologues into darkly comedic spheres, and a supreme cast helps the production on this tricky balance act.

Simon Russell Beale plays the leader of a sanatorium that claims to heal people of aberrant behaviour, but it’s the institution itself that has caught the incurable disease of arbitrary misuse of power. His ex-colonel Roote is at once incensed and slightly flummoxed by the events taking place on an unfortunate Christmas Day. One patient is dead and one patient has given birth – it’s all rather embarrassing for the state institution, the precise purpose of which we never find out about. A very physical performance from Beale, but huffing and puffing the way he does one wonders how Roote got into power in the first place. Much like most of today’s long-reigning despots one assumes that too much power will let you lose contact with reality a bit.

After being directed by Josie Rourke in Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists last year, John Heffernan returns to a similar kind of mad house where people are being mysteriously murdered and tortured. This time he is brilliant as the mischievous underling Lush, although at times Heffernan might be enjoying himself a tad too much on stage. Who can hold it against him? The interplay between the characters is impeccably smooth and full of energy, never failing to sustain the intricate banter created by the playwright.

John Simm is flawless as bureaucratic Gibbs who tries to climb the rank ladder and cleverly hides his monstrous motivations behind ministry procedures and report chains. The men’s power appears to be practically pheromonic to Indira Varma’s Mrs Cutts.

Soutra Gilmour’s design brings a bare, clinical creepiness onto the stage. Roote’s office and the examination room with its menacingly dangling wires are somewhat reminiscent of every soul-sucking office building in existence.

As elusive as the some parts of the play may seem when perceived through the walls of Pinter’s linguistic trickery, there is a clear political undercurrent dealing with the social responsibility of those in power. Although the characters are never cyphers it is surprising, especially for a piece that’s so bizarre in its tone, how all of these character and behavioural traits can be found in everyday political power structures. Lloyd takes to Pinter’s advice that in political theatre condescending “sermonising has to be avoided at all cost” and avoids spoon-feeding the moral of the piece. Instead, the marriage of a sublime, unsettling visual style with Pinter’s wit, full of alliterations, serpentine off-set rhythms and melodious, nuanced repetitions creates a texture that’s not entirely whimsical, but not square in your face either.

The absurdly comedic surface is constantly broken by echoing sounds of distant screams from never shown inmates being subjected to dubious treatments. All actual depictions of torture are comical to a disturbing degree and Harry Melling as the aptly named Lamb gets to suffer the full extent of other people’s ambition and commitment to tyrannical legacies.

What we get with The Hothouse is not a moralising tale about abuse of power, but an examination of characters who have been in power for too long, or those who aspire to power. When Hannah Arendt observed the banality of evil in state-sanctioned mass murderer Eichmann, the shock was to find it didn’t need a psychopath to commit atrocious crimes. All it takes is ordinary people and the right circumstances. That Jamie Lloyd turns this theme into a belly-shakingly funny romp makes it even more chilling.