Review: Measure for Measure, Almeida Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

You can tell the measure of a Measure by the way it treats its prisoners. In 2004, Complicité’s Claudio – dressed in an obligatory orange jumpsuit – was incarcarated in a complex of maximum security; all laser-beams and retina-scanners. By contrast, Michael Attenborough’s thoroughly intelligent staging casts its inmates in the denims and ankle-shackles of a Folsom concert crowd.

If, six years on, the political prisoners have been replaced by romanticised ne’erdowells, the authorities remain the play’s villains. Only, this time, the crimes they commit are different. Paranoid abuse of authority is replaced by a damning hypocrisy. Ben Miles’s Duke begins pacing his chaotic study, fidgeting with the fixtures in an attempt to shake off lascivious thoughts of strippers. He puts on one habit to throw off another. Likewise Rory Kinnear’s Angelo seems more culpable for his own lusty descent than for his broken promises to free Claudio. At least those hustlers and whores that stalk this very East End Vienna are honest in their lecherous lifestyles.

This is, you may have sensed, a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.

Best of all is Kinnear, whose physical attributes force him to delve deeper into Shakespeare’s lead in search of credible answers. His Angelo is a portrait of repression. He enters every inch the office clerk – square glasses, short-sleeved shirt and beige trousers so ill-fitting they could be worn backwards – and quickly renovates himself as a slick-suited, greasy example of contrived masculinity. There is an easy comparison with Sam West’s Jeffrey Skilling, who shares the same over-confident authority spun from nothing.

This super-imposed show of strength makes Anna Maxwell Martin’s fervent Isabella a well-matched sparring partner. Their first real locking of horns is eked for every last drop of drama, such that when Kinnear eventually delivers a death sentence on her brother, his words thud like arrows into a target. While her stillness gives way to a slow-crumple, he kneads his palms nervously under the table.

Yet for all that Maxwell Martin’s individual choices are strong, she doesn’t quite knit Isabella into a concrete whole. She brings an unconscious, albeit uncomfortable, sexuality to the role, sliding herself slowly up from her chair with a sliver of sensuality not dissimilar to the lap-dancers of the Duke’s imagination. Rather brilliantly, there is also an ugly goodness – malnourished rather than wholesome – about her over-zealous piety, suggested by hands gnarled into crooked claws. She’s right, of course, but too strong in her scorn for others. Her lofty morality manifests itself in an unattractive superiority from which emerges a withering contempt for pathetic men. Her rebuttal of the Duke’s final proposal – which also undermines his own nobility – is silent rather than sympathetic.

Attenborough’s production is less successful in its treatment of the play’s broader comedy. Lloyd Hutchinson’s harsh-toned Lucio is more irritating than lubricating and, as a Pompey become bouncer, Trevor Cooper doesn’t quite match the inspiration of his initial casting. For all that the underclass are victorious in this cartoonish class war, they themselves cannot match the authorities for interest.
Regardless, this is a superb production – the sort that makes you reassess your list of Shakespearean favourites – and, in Kinnear, it is driven by a tremendous central performance. By the end, as his hands returned to his sheepish side, Angelo seemed to me the exact opposite of Malvolio: a man most notoriously absolved.