The Stage

Measure for Measure

Published Thursday 24 November 2011 at 11:17 by Natasha Tripney

Roxana Silbert’s production of Shakespeare’s most morally knotty of plays is steeped in sex. Vienna has been made over to resemble a fetish club complete with whips, chains and shiny boots of leather. But though the production utilises the signifiers of sexual extremes, it’s neither particularly erotic nor subversive and more often than not it’s the comic elements that are pushed to the fore - all the nipple clamps and spanking seem to be there purely to amuse.

Jodie McNee (Isabella) and Raymond Coulthard (Duke Vincentio) in Measure for Measure at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon Photo: Hugo Glendinning

This serves to take some of the sting out of Isabella’s predicament over whether to sacrifice her virginity to save her brother’s life. Jodie McNee is clear-eyed and understated in the role. There is something shining and clean about her - she is guided by a good heart even as she is forced into an impossible corner. Raymond Coulthard brings a dash of the showman to his performance as the enigmatic disguised Duke, plucking coins from the air as he toys with the fortunes of others. Jamie Ballard, as the leather-girdled Angelo, is suitably intense, a man unsettled and ultimately undone by the strength of his desires.

The world of sexual transgression that the play inhabits is only ever superficially explored and the focus on transgression, despite the efforts of the cast and Garance Marneur’s playful set with its whip cord curtain and strips of pink neon, feels like so much (pierced and tattooed) garnish. When Joseph Kloska’s Pompey turns to the audience and accuses them of being fellow bawds, there’s no real sense of complicity.