Measure for Measure 2001

We prepared a version of Measure for Measure to open our second season, which included a wholly new scene of 50 lines (a first-half introduction for Mariana and her back-story with Angelo) written by the playwright, Dominic Power. That this went completely unremarked by any of the critics we reckoned the highest compliment to Dominic's ability to weave new material seamlessly into a classic text.

Saskia Portway

Saskia Portway as Mariana. Photo: Alan Moore

Director's Note

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna

  There have been times in the 400 year life of this play when it has been thought too indecent in its subject matter or too repellent in its characters to be produced on the stage at all.  Though modern audiences are rarely so squeamish, the play continues to be controversial, still dividing audiences into ardently pro and anti–Isabella lobbies.
  That is probably just as it should be.  I doubt if Shakespeare set out to direct us into one camp or the other, being more concerned to explore the functions and the limits of moral certainty among men and women feeling the pressures and contradictions of their own humanity in their severest forms.  So if tonight you find the play morally ambiguous, I make no apology.
  Themes apart, the play presents the actor and director with many puzzles.  Formally speaking it is a comedy, in that – like A Midsummer Night’s Dream - it pursues a potentially tragic scenario through to a happy conclusion.  But it feels a world away from the spirit of that play, our modern term ‘black comedy’ feeling rather more appropriate.  It also seems in some ways incomplete, as if Shakespeare had run out of time, or been compromised by the circumstances of one of the play’s first performances (perhaps the premiere), given in 1604 before the newly-crowned James 1.
  For this production the playwright Dominic Power has produced a version of the text.  A risky strategy, except that every production of a Shakespeare play is in a sense a version. The breadth of his comprehension is so vast, so apparently complete, that whether we wish it or not, our engagement with the plays is almost inevitably partial, powerfully affected by the values and concerns that our own changing circumstances force on us.  Here we take that engagement a step further than is generally the rule in the theatre, but I believe at no greater risk to the play’s integrity than many a company’s presentation of the unamended Folio. 
  If you already know the play, I hope you agree.  If it is new to you, I hope you find it expressive, articulate and exciting. Andrew Hilton

Cast

Duke Peter Clifford
Escalus  Robert Pheby
Angelo John Mackay
Friar Peter Gyuri Sarossy
Lucio Cameron Fitch
Froth & Barnadine David Collins
Mistress Overdone Carol Brannan
Pompey Chris Donnelly
Claudio Stuart Crossman
Provost Jonathan Nibbs
Officer Nick Wilkes
Isabella Lucy Black
Nun & Juliet Rebecca Smart
Elbow & Abhorson Paul Nicholson
Mariana Saskia Portway
Servant Tom Rogers

PRODUCTION

Director Andrew Hilton
Designer Andrea Montag
Lighting Designer Paul Towson
Edition Dominic Power
Music John Telfer
Production Photographer Alan Moore

Production Manager Dan Danson
Stage Managers Samantha Portlock & Esther Last
Technical Stage Manager Mim Spenser

Reviews

The Guardian
* * * * 
February 12 2001
  ’Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall,” professes Angelo, the newly appointed regent of the Duke. Shakespeare certainly knew how to pile on the irony, and 400 years on this notoriously difficult and morally tricky play still has the power to send you out of the theatre arguing for and against the characters and their actions.
For a modern audience, Isabella’s determination to save her virginity over the life of her brother can make her seem priggish, but even if you take that view the drama is sufficiently slippery to throw up plenty of other moral propositions. Do two wrongs make a right? And what about the behaviour of the Duke? These questions become urgent, necessary and utterly contemporary in good productions of this play, and this is a very fine rendition indeed.
Director Andrew Hilton is a bit of a puritan about Shakespeare.  He stages it in period costume and without embellishment. There are no tricks, just clear storytelling, excellent verse speaking and intricate, wonderfully detailed performances. The acting of every single player here, right down to the smallest role, is crystal.  Even the tiny part of the Nun is beautifully done.
In such a good cast, it is almost a shame to pick people out, but John Mackay’s Angelo is wonderfully complex and right from the beginning conveys his fallibility. His reluctance to take the Duke’s chair suggests that he has enough self-knowledge to be aware of his own weaknesses. That he knows that he will fall.
As Isabella, Lucy Black suggests not a saint, but a quiet woman with a steely resolve who can get quite snappy when stressed. The ending is just wonderful; with her brother unexpectedly restored to her and the Duke rushing her into marriage, Isabella doesn’t look suffused with joy but has the glazed, horrified look of a woman who has just realized that a juggernaut is bearing down on her at 100 miles an hour. Lyn Gardner

The Observer 
 4th March 2001
  MORE AND MORE it seems the best theatre is happening outside theatre buildings. Take the company called Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory. Just over a year ago its artistic director Andrew Hilton commandeered an industrial building once central to Bristol’s financial prosperity. He has drawn on another rich resource of the city: young actors fresh from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre school. He is eliciting luminous performances, producing forceful, distinctly articulated Shakespeare.
  A big cast in a small bare space: there’s intensity but also expansiveness in Hilton’s direction of Measure for Measure, played in Elizabethan costume with scant props and scene changes signaled by a dipping of lights and a few trumpet trills. The production, set in the round in a low-ceilinged, iron-pillared room, is near enough to be watched by the audience as a series of close-ups.
  Many of these have to do with women’s faces. In the opening moments, a nun, reluctantly admitting a visitor to her convent, twists and turns away from him as he tries to see her features – like a butterfly flitting from a collector’s net. In the closing sequence, as Lucy Black’s taut, concentrated Isabella is claimed by the Duke in marriage as by right, she looks at him not with docile pleasure but bleakly, as if suddenly realizing she’s been betrayed; you can almost see the colour draining from her face.
  It’s hard not to regard Isabella as a bit of a pill. It would be satisfying to see the scene when she refuses to accede to the seduction which might save her brother from death – ‘More than our brother is our chastity’ – played so that the audience are free to groan at her. Hilton doesn’t do this, but he does capture the pervasive iciness which steals through the play. John Mackay’s Angelo, with measured tread and swiveling eye, is so locked up in himself that he barely knows whether he’s being hypocritical or not: at his moment of greatest agitation he merely tightens the vicarish clasping of his hands. To strike a restaurantish note, my companion, who arrived full of grumbles at a play he considered preposterous, left in tears. Susannah Clapp