Measure For Measure – Pumphouse Theatre, 23 January 2024: Review. Shakespeare in the Park 2024

25th January 2024

Shoreside Theatre’s annual Shakespeare in the Park (performed at the delightful Pumphouse Amphitheatre) this year brings us Measure for Measure – a work staged much less often than their other offering (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

The Duke of Vienna, having let some of the city’s laws languish, pretends to leave, and deputises one Lord Angelo, only to return disguised as a friar to see what plays out.

When Angelo means to make an example out of Claudio by executing him for fornication, his sister Isabella (a nun) goes to plead his case. It all goes awry when Angelo propositions Isabella, saying he will save her brother if only she will sleep with him.

The play opens with debris from a raucous party strewn about the stage which must then be cleaned up. A nice visual metaphor for the cleaning of the streets soon to be enforced by Angelo.

Written and first performed around 1604, Measure for Measure marks the end of Shakespeare’s simple comedies.

It was during this period that he wrote many of his great tragedies and, indeed, Measure presents us with quite serious subjects. Abuse of power, hypocrisy, executions, and musings on the nature and enforcement of morality.

Yet it is also full of bawdy comedy, wordplay, disguises, and dramatic irony, and keeps to a fundamental comedic structure in that it ends happily with the restoration of order.

It is sometimes classified as a problem play meaning, as Shoreside explains, that it brings up a difficulty and then solves it. But the play also presents several problems when it comes to performing it for a modern audience, including this strange push-and-pull between comedy and tragedy.

Director James Bell manages to contend with this issue quite nicely, allowing the weight of Isabella’s (Āria Harrison-Sparke) scenes to stand, assisted by the grounded performances of Harrison-Sparke and Nick Milnes as Angelo.

This was contrasted by the more outlandish, comedic characters, who were given more freedom to be larger than life.

There were a few decisions made seemingly in the name of comedy which I didn’t think quite worked. For example, Juliet (Alice Dibble) was portrayed as dour and unhappy in her relationship to Claudio (Chris Raven). Yet the whole issue of Claudio’s relative moral innocence rests in the fact that they are in love, that their act of sin was mutually committed.

However, other choices were made smartly to heighten both the low and high brow comedy. Mistress Overdone (Steph Curtis) was perfectly played as a sultry westie, complete with a do-bro hair roller. Curtis also played the nun inducting Isabella, and this casting creates a wonderful irony. A playful tension between sexual appetites and sexual purity which runs throughout the story.

Marianna was portrayed by Terri Mellender as excitable and girlish. This added a dash of colour and joyous comedy to the final scene, which becomes quite procedural as the play turns its attention to unravelling the great plot concocted by the Duke.

This brings us to another major problem, the character of the Duke. His disguise as a friar creates much dramatic irony, yet his motives are largely inaccessible to us.

He is the one who shapes the story, seeming to test everyone around him, causing much emotional distress as he waits until the eleventh hour to reveal his identity. He is a figure of divine (and good) authority, but his machinations also seem far too chaotic to be solidly premeditated.

Stuart Tupp plays the Duke as a rather bumbling figure, making sense of him as someone with good intentions who doesn’t really know what he’s doing. This worked well in the more comedic scenes but lent little depth to his character overall.

The Duke as written, has a natural authority about him which he uses to weave the threads of the story and tie up the loose ends.

Bell, at one point, had the Duke push Claudio off a bench to wake him from slumber. This needlessly cruel act garnered quite a reaction from the audience and confused me greatly about the direction the production was taking with the Duke’s character.

Is he a force of ultimate good? An agent of fate or fallibly human? Is he self-serving or selfless? These are questions raised by the text which Shoreside’s production was not quite able to grapple with.

Another problem to navigate is that Measure is rooted, more so than many other Shakespearean works, in the time it was written. It deals with sexuality and spirituality, things that were deeply intertwined in Shakespeare’s day. Much of the wordplay requires contextual understanding to appreciate.

Bell managed to make comedy out of this issue, having Claudio shout to the audience “You’ve all done it!” as he was paraded for being a fornicator, highlighting the absurdity of his punishment particularly to modern sensibilities.

As Shoreside Theatre point out when they call it a play for today, Measure does have potently relevant themes, particularly relating to power, sex, and the subjugation of women.

Bell has Angelo pour a glass of whiskey as he attempts to seduce and then silence Isabella, reminding us of a CEO or Hollywood executive and so transcending the bounds of time. These early scenes between Angelo and Isabella are eerily close to our MeToo discourse.

It is such a joy to see a lesser-known Shakespeare performed, and I commend Shoreside for their desire to engage with Measure for Measure. It is a deeply interesting though somewhat strange work that is ripe for interpretation and discourse.

While a little more clarity with the text on the part of the actors would’ve really helped lift the words off the page, it was an overall heartfelt performance that drew many giggles and made full use of the amphitheatre space.

Shakespeare’s work continues to be relevant, not only because of its universal themes, but also because the act of interpretation itself makes it so.

Whenever we retell a story, we shape it a little differently, we consider its meanings from new angles. Shoreside is one of the few companies that continues to perform Shakespeare in Auckland.

Though it should be noted they are an amateur company and so it is understandable the performance is not perfect. Their passion for the material shines brightly even as the summer skies darken into night.

Erin O’Flaherty