Measure for Measure

“It was good but I don’t know what it was about,” concluded the theatre enthusiast beside me. He’d never seen Measure for Measure, let alone in Russian.

It’s a rigorous, bracing production from Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre, with director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod from Britain’s famed Cheek by Jowl – a star offering of the Sydney Festival.  But, yes, you need to know the play.

This quicksilver production may be Shakespeare edited down and offered as surtitles, but read like this his fine words on governance, sexual hypocrisy and corruption are, for us non-Russians, scrambled in the rush.  The thrill is in the action below, through which the 13 actors huddle and weave like some community chorus witnessing our gullibility.  

Across Ormerod’s five giant red containers, under rows of institutional lights, scenes speed across a sparse stage in a flash, each focused  and deliciously detailed with wit and violent threat.

To clean up his vice-ridden city, the Duke (Alexander Arsentyev) retires in disguise to a monastery and passes power to Angelo (Andrei Kuzichev), a clean shaven, Putin look-a-like who bristles with moral certainty.  His first victim is the young Claudio (Kiryl Dytsevich), to be executed for fornication, but when Claudio’s pious sister, Isabella, comes begging for his life, Angelo turns lustful and tries to barter for her maidenhead.

Anna Khalilulina is wonderfully alert and passionate as Isabella, jousting with Angelo’s cold tyranny, the Russian armed police always angling around dangerously.

The final moral showdown is staged as a political rally but even this inventiveness fails to answer Shakespeare’s oddly tame, even comic ending of forgiveness.  Good theatre shouldn’t demand prior homework but that’s the way to get the best Measure of this memorable production.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton