Measure for Measure

Next week's school play is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Mr Anthony introduces the play, and explains some of the thoughts behind his production, which updates the play to 1980s London.
 

Measure for Measure is a play about a man who starts a fire in order to demonstrate his skill in putting it out. As a politician the Duke is conceited, idle and capricious (as well as being a compulsive liar), more concerned with re-igniting public awe at his absolute majesty than with restoring the fractured judicial system that his own negligence has allowed to crumble. As such, in a PR stunt of notable modernity, he temporarily absconds from his state, overlooks the uniquely qualified Escalus as replacement, and instead appoints a politically inexperienced junior, Angelo, to flounder in his place.

A mentally self-flagellating, Puritan zealot, Angelo sees crime devoid of context and is belligerently unwilling to dim his piercing justice by acknowledging any shade of human fallibility (even when, in the play’s early stages, he turns this searing spotlight upon his own sexual appetites). His first act in office is a test case then, a flag in the ground to denote his own chill wind: the sentencing of Claudio for the crime of fornicating with his lover (in Jacobean England it was common for a couple to take each other as man and wife before the confirmation of a church ceremony, so even Shakespeare’s original audience would have balked at this immoderate intervention).

Such stringent policing of sexual propriety is a decided inconvenience for a city whose sex trade appears a major economic force; the prose text of ‘low’ characters – the madams, pimps and punters – is allowed unusual prominence against the verse in Measure for Measure. At the time of the play’s first performance in 1604, the south bank of the Thames, infamous for its freedom from the restraints of the city fathers, boasted a wide selection of brothels, from the ‘Bankside stews’ such as the Cardinal’s Hat, to the moated citadel of Holland’s Leaguer (where dinner with the legendary ‘quean Bess’ retailed at c.£1700 in today’s currency), all in walking distance of the Globe theatre. It is no surprise that Lucio, self-appointed spokesman for this amoral underclass, wishes the return of the 'old fantastical Duke of dark corners', in a speech that truly gets the measure of the Duke’s duplicitous governance, and for which Lucio must therefore be punished in the play’s final act.

But by far the most beleaguered character in the midst of this vast political experiment is Isabella, a novice nun sent to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. Across five acts she is not afforded one conversation with a man in which he does not aim to manipulate her mind or body in order to attain the pride of public exoneration or the satisfaction of ego and/or desire. Claudio, Lucio, Angelo, Friar Peter and even Escalus all deny her an identity as anything other than a pious impediment to the smooth functioning of patriarchal power, on both a personal and state level; she is variously expected to sacrifice virginity, dignity, religion, ethics, truth and freedom of choice, in order that the lives of the men around her may continue unhindered. In 2018, with the Time’s Up movement gaining pace, Isabella’s narrative is eerily prescient; her call for justice resonates through the final scene, in which the word is used eleven times, seven of them by her.

In setting Measure for Measure in 1980s London, I hope to make visual the discord between the politicians and the populus who are, for the most part, working towards quite separate ends in the course of the play. The choice of a derelict warehouse in a pre-regeneration Docklands was inspired by the work of queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, who established an artists’ squat in an old grain mill in the area and who used the surrounding urban wasteland as a backdrop for key works such as Jubilee (1978) and The Last of England (1987).

Jarman’s art is an antidote to the impatient self-aggrandizement, aesthetic uniformity and aggressive masculinity of Thatcherite ‘yuppie’ culture (here represented by the play’s governing class); the brief but fertile New Romantic movement (1979-1981) which pushed androgyny, New Wave synth-pop and a dandified sense of self-fashioning into the mainstream (via artists such as Culture Club and Spandau Ballet) is the central stylistic influence on the play’s working class contingent, who are bonded by a gutsy, often bawdy, defiance of state intervention.

Angelo’s abstract morality of antithetical binaries is, of course, as inefficient and inhumane as the Duke’s mockery of Christian mercy, through which salvation becomes a wheel of whimsy to be spun at his own behest. Yet the tonic of a moderate political middle ground is not forthcoming. The absence of such ideological resolution within the play has made it unpalatable for many over the centuries, with critics finding apt symbolism for their bewilderment in its uncomfortable schism of genre. For Measure for Measure is a Comedy with no love and a Tragedy with no death (the death of the mysterious Ragozine and the supposed love – and this I doubt – of Julietta for Claudio or Marianna for Angelo find no meaningful expression within the parameters of the play); the uneasy liminal terrain the play abandons its characters and audience in tells us much about the natural desire for, and commensurate dangers of, moral certainty, as well as the hollow theatricality on which state power depends. Indeed the closest thing to a conclusion that Shakespeare provides in all this is the decidedly troubling mantra uttered by the wise but politically impotent Escalus:

Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall. 

Or, to put it another way:

It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it,
That’s what gets results. (Bananarama)