Angelo: Awakening the Beast
"Angelo is someone who lives in a world of ideas"72: the embodiment of the law, who believes in it to such a degree that he will enforce it regardless of who the offender is, or indeed from what class they come. John Mortimer described him as:
a cold blooded judge who regards the law as a kind of perfect computer to be operated without human feelings ... [The law against fornication] fails to pass the test of natural justice because it quite fails to take into account the reality of human nature. But for the cold-blooded Judge Angelo, it's the law and that's enough."73
Angelo's safe and certain world is shattered by the most devastating and life-changing of discoveries--the awakening of his sexuality. Unfortunately for Isabella, the object of his desire, this awakening happens when she is in need of his compassion, and he is in the first flush of power. The scene in which Angelo's emotions uncontrollably erupt (Act 2 Scene 4) is one of the most electrifying and disturbing in the Shakespearean canon. The potent mix of emotions ignited between these two repressed characters is very revealing, and shifts the play from "the question of the criminal's guilt to that far more interesting matter, the guilt of the judge."74
Michael Pennington, who played Angelo in Keith Hack's 1974 production, suggested,
In the case of Angelo, you are dealing with someone who is obviously a very efficient and competent career man but who knows nothing at all about himself sexually and is very much out of touch with that side of his personality. So that when his sexuality is triggered off it is of a very adolescent and uncertain kind. He is very much like Isabella. They're both absolutists, very proud and with great concern about self-image.
In the set of mirrors which reflects the world of Measure, it is possible to see Isabella and Angelo as siblings, as partners, because they do use the same kind of language. We wanted to try and catch the similarity between them. Perhaps in another world they might be lovers. There was a sexual potential between them that I wanted to catch, and I also felt very strongly that Angelo's crime is not what he thinks it is. He thinks it is desiring a saint, whereas it is a political crime, it is a monstrous abuse of his position, so that I think the crux of his downfall is political.75
Ian Richardson played Angelo as someone "highly sexed ... and aware of all things sensual" but who chose to suppress his desires. With the loosening of censorship laws in 1970 Richardson saw an opportunity to provide a more sexually deviant reading of the part:
I physically abused her and pressed my hands firmly up her skirts. I also felt that Angelo's sexuality was rather sinister, so I asked Estelle [Kohler] if we could do some business where I pulled her hair ... perhaps a kind of sadist who has met a masochist, and this rubbed off on Sarah Kestelman who played Mariana, who felt that if this was so ... then she must play the part as someone who really rather goes in for that kind of thing. It was an exciting and good production.76
2. 1970, John Barton production. Ian Richardson as Angelo, Estelle Kohler as Isabella. "Angelo's sexuality was rather sinister" and he performed "some business where [he] pulled her hair."
In this production Angelo's disgust at his own behavior and the possibilities of his darker nature were exposed only after the scene: "In the coldly perverted interview he advanced to her butting her with his groin. Only in solitude was he able to relax his act as he broke down in tears at the thought of his apostasy and inherent weaknesses."77
David Haig, who played Angelo in 1991, pointed out that,
If Angelo's channelled his feelings and drives into the law, she's channelled them into her faith. It could have sexual roots, this kind of diversionary tactic ... [He believed that] those two encounters between Angelo and Isabella in which she deploys her considerable brainpower constitute probably the first time he's been intellectually engaged by somebody of the opposite sex. Here are two minds that are meeting equally ... she drags him in from his containment because of the forcefulness of her ideas and her passion. Part of her appeal to him is that she's drawn him into her intellectual sphere.78
The physical brutality of Angelo, first explored by Ian Richardson, was again evident in David Haig's performance: "When Isabella twigs to his meaning and threatens to expose him, this Angelo reacts with a chilling, frenzied violence, slamming her down on his sofa and shaking her as though she were some rag-doll."79 Critics were quick to recognize the implications of the production:
What [Trevor] Nunn is at pains to explore are the locked-in demons which lurk behind this demeanour of upright rectitude. And what we take away with us is a shattering analysis of a potential wife beater, rapist or worse ... Put a woman at his mercy, ask him to show her human compassion and he can relate only by proving himself the dominant male. The sinister quality in all this is heightened by David Haig's obsessively neat beard, a jaw-framing affair reminding one instinctively of the Yorkshire Ripper [a notorious serial killer of the time].80
Angelo's self-knowledge has been portrayed as being catastrophic for the character himself. In an unusual but affectingly sympathetic reading, Alex Jennings in 1994 played Angelo as:
a man of iron control and impeccable religiosity who views his own moral disintegration with something approaching panic. He consistently harps on the word "evil" and, rather than paw and claw Isabella, throws himself at her feet in abject humiliation. Once exposed he craves death, as if he knows he can never reconstruct his sense of identity.81
In 1978 Jonathan Pryce brought out the sexual frustration that underlies Angelo's appetite for order. He played the part as a man who ultimately cannot face living with the knowledge of the darker self that dwells within him. His performance was so effective that it had the very odd result of making him the "sympathetic centre of the play. [At the end] the attention is held by [Angelo], completing a superbly rounded interpretation, with a vacant and terrified stare of panicky regret while awaiting final adjudication."82 As John Mortimer pointed out:
We are all born with the same imperfections, call it human frailty if you are an Atheist or original sin if you happen to be a Christian. Judges are wise men, perhaps, but as prey to lust and envy and prejudice as those they have to try ... Is any man or woman fit to sit in judgement on a fellow human being? ... is judgement on our fellow human beings at best any more than hypocrisy?83
Isabella's Choice
Irony attaching to plot and character is given its most powerful expression in the denouement when the duke, in his Friar's gown, and Isabella, in her novice's habit, dissociate themselves from the particular obligations which those habiliments symbolize and belatedly emerge as hero and heroine of a romantic comedy.84
Productions have variously ended with Isabella happily accepting the duke's proposal, completely shocked to the point of madness, making a downright refusal of his offer, or in total indecision. The portrayal of the duke and his motives will, of course, affect the final outcome, but some productions have also implied that the duke's social position leaves Isabella with no option but to accept him, regardless of her own feelings.
Isabella's faith, humanity, and identity go through a test of fire during the play and in the end she is left with a choice: to accept the man who has put her through this ordeal, or to return to a world removed from the company of men. Isabella's choice in productions of Measure for Measure will often depend on whether the actress portrays her as an innocent but strong woman of faith and integrity who is brought to an understanding of herself and mercy, or as someone neurotically repressed, "a prig ... running away from the world into the convent because she's frightened of her own sexuality."85
Anne Barton, in the program notes to the RSC's 1970 production, asks the time-honored question: why does Isabella not make any verbal reply to the duke's proposal? And suggests: "It is at least possible that this silence is one of dismay."86 Judi Dench, who played Isabella in 1962, thought:
There seems to be no explanation for the way she suddenly renounces her vocation to become a nun, but I think that she has learnt about we
akness. It's as if she was, at the beginning of the play, a very young girl, who sees everything as either positive or negative, good or bad, white or black. Her character is flawed because of this but during the play she learns about human weakness, not only from the Duke, but also from Angelo. The change that Shakespeare intends her to undergo is that she should see that everything is not so simple and straightforward and that there are shades of grey. She learns to be compassionate and to make allowances for other people ... By the end of the play, Isabella, like Angelo, has been made to face reality and has even questioned her decision to become a nun. So the acceptance of the Duke doesn't come as such a surprise and is perhaps a marriage of minds anyway.87
3. 1962, John Blatchley production. Judi Dench as Isabella believed she was a woman who "has [learned] about human weakness."
But changing attitudes to sexual politics by 1970 questioned this reasoning. Referred to as a "feminist" production, John Barton's gave the RSC its first in which Isabella appeared to flatly refuse the proposal of the duke:
He shrugs slightly, saddened, and leaves the stage ... But I'm confident that Shakespeare meant "so" to mean "now that's done" rather than "too bad," which is the way [Sebastian] Shaw pronounces it. Does Barton mean to imply that Isabella finds the Duke as Machiavellian as everyone else, or what? It isn't clear, hasn't been prepared for, and (I suspect) isn't justified.88
In 1983, "both the political and the theatrical climate had changed ... chastity was being reclaimed as a sexual option."89 Where Estelle Kohler had played Isabella's character as a "collision of sexual nausea and cold Puritanism,"90 Juliet Stevenson rejected the idea that Isabella was retreating from the world due to some sort of sexual neurosis. She saw Isabella's decision to go into a convent as a positive one, a means of bringing goodness into the world through prayer. The trial in the last act exposed the "seemers" for what they really were, and Isabella's test had revealed a sensuality that did not detract from her faith. The emphasis was on a meeting of minds:
unless the Duke takes on the trial of himself, which involves bringing himself to let Lucio off the hook, to exercise forgiveness, he hasn't learned the capacity for mercy from Isabella, and there is no justification for a happy ending. Nothing mutual has been established between them. He watched me watching, turned back to Lucio, and reprieved the death sentence ... I used to take a long, long pause, in which I looked at everyone--drawing in the collective experience in a way. Then I took the Duke's hand ... Shakespeare gives Isabella no words at the end. Maybe because she doesn't know what to say to the Duke's proposal. It's often the case with female protagonists: discounting the Epilogue, Rosalind doesn't speak for the last twenty minutes of As You Like It.91
Other productions favored an ambiguous ending:
I stammered hesitantly on the first [proposal] ... trying to show the Duke's realization of the anguish and pain he has put Isabella through ... Josette [Simon] gave me a long appraising stare, and still did not consent. The play stops rather than ends, leaving many possibilities in the air ... In our production we tried to show this open, unresolved ending by putting a wordless coda after the text has finished. In Mark Thompson's set the huge city gates had been drawn up to reveal a kind of idyllic pastoral never-never land beyond ... Isabella goes towards the pastoral scene at the back, stops, and turns back towards the city and the Duke as the lights go down. People often used to ask me whether they married or not, annoyed at our denying them a happy ending, or suspicious at our being over-optimistic. We thought probably they did, but only after a very long conversation.92
In a darker reading, the disturbing nature of the duke's manipulations on Isabella's psyche were played out in the final scene of Steven Pimlott's 1994 production:
at the end, Stella Gonet's Isabella fetches the Duke (Michael Feast) a stinging slap across the chops when he makes his tactless, last-minute pitch to become an item with her. No sooner has she hit him than she's passionately kissing him better ... then she has second thoughts about that response too, abruptly recoiling with little sobs, still clearly in shock from the emotional turmoil his scheming has caused.93
4. 1994, Steven Pimlott production. Stella Gonet as Isabella, Michael Feast as the duke. The final scene showed Isabella "still clearly in shock from the emotional turmoil his scheming has caused."
The marriage of the duke and Isabella, should it occur, points to a resolution that would bring a possible healing to their ruptured and chaotic society. In the latter part of the twentieth century our inherent mistrust of leaders and politicians made that happy ending less acceptable and the resulting future of the characters and their state less certain or secure. Isabella's choice is personal and political. In the face of collapsing values and beliefs, she, with the duke, through their learned understanding, compassion, and mercy, have a chance to restore order and to enact the laws of that society with a justice that is tempered by the understanding of human fallibility.
PLAYING MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Sir Trevor Nunn is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company's work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles: Macbeth (1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place), Othello (1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), and King Lear (2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London). He talks here about his 1991 RSC production of Measure for Measure in the intimate studio space of The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Josette Simon OBE (born 1960) is a British actress of Antiguan descent. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and has performed frequently with the Royal National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as appearing regularly on television and in film. As a black actor, she has been at the forefront of "color-blind casting," frequently taking roles traditionally considered white. Her RSC repertoire includes roles in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labour's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. She talks here about playing Isabella in Nicholas Hytner's 1987 production for the RSC in Stratford and London.
Roger Allam (born in 1953) is an English actor, known primarily for his stage career, although he has performed in film and television. He has been nominated three times for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor, winning once. He has also been nominated for, and won, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor. He played Inspector Javert in the original RSC production of the stage musical Les Miserables. He first joined the RSC in 1981 and his roles have included Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Theseus/Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Clarence in Richard III, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and the duke in Nicholas Hytner's 1987 production of Measure for Measure, which he talks about here.
Trevor Nunn: Directing Measure
I did a very particular production of Measure for Measure as part of a venture that presented Shakespeare's play in repertoire with a stage adaptation of The Blue Angel [the famous 1930 film by Josef von Sternberg, starring Marlene Dietrich]. Therefore, in my mind, the Vienna of Shakespeare's play became the Vienna of Freud and the study of sexual aberration, obsession, and fantasy in psychological terms. The duke became, relatively easily, a Freud-like intellectual who was intent on conducting an experiment to provide himself with a case history. This study was focused on a youngish authoritarian administrator, Angelo, to find o
ut whether his extreme judgmental behavior might have a root in sexual repression.
Given that this was a small theater production, created to open the spanking new Other Place Theatre in Stratford, but also to tour to nontheater venues around the British Isles, the design was very simple and not at all pictorially descriptive of the different locations the play requires. However, the intention, through the use of a few elements of furniture and bold lighting and detailed costumes, was to provide a sense of very real spaces, and therefore the production was not burdened by an overarching or symbological design concept.
My experience was that audiences didn't find Isabella in any way unbelievable, even though her priorities and decisions are alarming. I think this was because it became very clear, very quickly in the production that Isabella was an obsessive personality, that her determination to remove herself from the world and spend her life as a celibate nun was, in her case, both maladjusted and extreme. Isabella is not a "heroine" in any traditional sense. She is a troubled and unbalanced character whom we observe slowly moving toward self-knowledge as she is confronted with the awareness of her sexuality. Shakespeare encapsulates Isabella's condition in the phrase, "More than our brother is our chastity." It's a shocking statement, but it exemplifies her extreme state of mind.
In this production, Isabella was clearly very young, still in late teenage, impressionable, full of the urgency and intolerance of youth, and unaware, to a great extent, of her impact on others. As a novice, she was dressed severely, but not yet in the robes and cowl of a nun who had already taken her vows. Once alone with Angelo, she was fervent and spontaneous and, consumed with the same zeal as in her religious faith, she pursued Angelo to the point where she was touching him, taking his hand, coming into "his space," breaking that invisible barrier we all instinctively observe in normal social contact. Thus Angelo was immensely affected by her vigor, her whirlwind passionate appeal, and was very understandably aroused by her proximity.