Measure for Pleasure
By Alisa Solomon
Measure for Measure
By William Shakespeare
The Globe Theatre at St. Ann's Warehouse
(closed)
A funny thing happened to me at St. Ann's
Warehouse in December. I came to a new understanding of a play
I already knew well: Measure for Measure. I know that's
what some people always say--that seeing Shakespeare's works again
and again rewards them with fresh insights and a tighter grasp
on the complex course of his art. It's a fundamental article of
faith, recited in grant proposals, course syllabi, and government
policy papers. I've believed it myself and professed it with devotion.
But when it actually happened last month at a visiting production
from London's Globe Theatre, directed by John Dove, I realized
how rarely I feel such an exhilarating surge of discovery while
watching a canonical play. Suddenly my long-standing convictions
seemed merely rote, even hollow.
Too often, performances of well-known works
give off "a sporting event quality," as the director Brian Kulick
has put it. I take him to mean that we engage the familiar play
wondering: Will the director call for a bunt where we would have
done so? Will this Hamlet hit a home run? We watch to see where
the production will line up with -- or challenge -- what we already
think. Along the way, it might send up some sparks of a bright
idea (the centrality of "poison" -- and the homology with "prison,"
for instance -- in the Hamlet Kulick recently directed
at the CSC, starring Michael Cumpsty). A particular actor might
make some strong choices that put events into sharp relief (Andrew
Weems's gruff and mangy Thersites, who personified the rot in
the martial myths of Troilus and Cressida in Peter Hall's
production for Theater for a New Audience.) Most often these days
(these last several decades, really), an overarching metaphor
might hammer a primary theme (the abattoir setting with its hunks
of hacked meat in Edward Hall's Rose Rage--his visceral
version of the Henry VI trilogy.) In the end, though,
we simply assess the impact of such innovations against our own
interpretation of the play, on the basis of which we can say whether
the new notions "worked." But they haven't moved us experientially,
suddenly to see the whole with new acuity.
The Globe's Measure did. It all
came together with a small gesture in the last scene--as the Duke,
Mark Rylance (the Globe's departing artistic director) closed
his eyes, pressed his hands to his breast and held his breath.
He was making a wish. Or offering up a prayer. Mariana had just
asked Isabella to kneel with her to ask the Duke to revoke the
death sentence he had pronounced against Angelo. "Against all
sense you do importune her," the Duke tells Mariana (the woman
who had been betrothed to Angelo and took Isabella's place in
the bed trick.) But she tries again. And the Duke stands firm:
"He dies for Claudio's death." But in the beat after Mariana's
implausible request -- which foreshadows the one that will follow
the Duke's abrupt marriage proposal some 50 lines later, as I
realized for the first time in this moment -- the Duke squeezes
his eyes shut and hopes against hope. And he opens them, quietly
letting out his breath, when Isabella pleads, "Let him not die."
That the Duke silently yearns for this
outcome -- rather than either guiding it or being shocked by it,
as the scene is often played -- unlocks the emotion in the action
and propels the play toward the surprising satisfaction of its
overly tidy ending. Isabella's act of grace, her unselfconscious
excess of generosity, feels thrilling and the Duke's reaction
guides us to experience it as such. He looks at her with wonder
and covers his face with his hands, as though weeping. No wonder
he impulsively asks for her hand.
The multiple marriages of the final scene,
unwished for as they may be in some instances, offer the formal
shape of a comedy. But the comic sensibility comes from Isabella
-- and the Duke's elated response to her-- because her choice
gives credence to the Duke's faith in human goodness.
Most critical responses to the production's
multi-city U.S. tour misidentified the source of its vitality
and sense of possibility. The reviews emphasized Rylance's portrayal
of the Duke as a bumbler, improvising in his friar's disguise
as he seeks to save Claudio from Angelo's iron rule. Certainly
Rylance exploits the comedic current in the role -- even making
a Falstaffian entrance in a laundry basket at one point. 
But
this is not a matter of merely playing for yuks. Rather, Rylance's
Duke genuinely seems to be confused by the contradictory demands
of paternalistic governance: to "love the people," as he says,
and also to enforce "the needful bits and curbs to headstrong
jades." That his own trusted deputy turns out to need reining
in most of all seems to confound him further. He seems lost, too,
inevitably so, in the play's world of binary absolutes (liberty/justice,
whoring/chastity, rigidity/charity, nature/law, and so on). Addled
by running from one pole to the other, Rylance's Duke creates
some middle ground to stand on.
These values register because of the production's
overall clarity and energy -- themselves products of the company's
famous "original practices" approach: bare thrust stage, pageantry
and music provided by live performers, natural lighting, an all-male
cast. The point isn't to make a fetish of "authenticity," but
to take Shakespeare out of the illusionistic frame that shapes
our post-proscenium viewing habits and to focus attention on the
actors and their language. Here the bodies before us and the words
they utter create all the effects. We not only listen more keenly
as a result; we also experience multiple meanings and ironies
more organically.
The dance that ends the performance is
the most invigorating example. The Duke has just untangled all
the knots and paired off the couples for impending marriages --
though Isabella is famously silent in response to his own proposal
-- and he pronounces the rhyming lines that close the play, leading
everyone off in a processional exit. His retinue, with their period
oboes and viols, strike up a jaunty tune and the company arrays
itself into position for a court dance of hopping steps and little
kicks. The play itself is clearly over -- these are actors now,
enjoying themselves, not characters in a restored realm. Yet when
Edward Hogg as Isabella shoots Rylance a smile a few bars into
the dance, it's as if her selflessness and her belief in the human
capacity to become better bestow grace on us all.
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