https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/measure-for-measure-at-the-barbican-nw97qpg5dcz

 

Measure for Measure at the Barbican

Kate Bassett

Saturday April 18 2015, 1.01am BST, The Times

 

The characters swarm in and out of the shadows, haunting one another

 

Declan Donnellan, of the company Cheek by Jowl, again proves he is among the world’s most insightful, bold and sensitive directors of Shakespeare with Measure for Measure, which is touring internationally. His superb Russian cast, who perform in their native tongue with English subtitles, are so electrifyingly intense and disturbing that they make your hair stand on end.

Aptly for a play about shocking duplicitousness, the set, designed by Nick Ormerod, is deceptively simple in appearance. The vice-ridden city, where the ducal ruler hands over power to his would-be purgative deputy Angelo, is just a black chasm framed by blocks of scarlet.

However, within this near-abstract realm, Donnellan creates a politically and psychologically complex weave of characters that is richly suggestive. They swarm in and out of the shadows, watching and haunting each other, sometimes like spies, sometimes like each other’s fantasies hitherto suppressed. A grey-suited apparatchik, pallid as a death’s-head, Andrei Kuzichev’s Angelo at first mirrors the neurotically jittering duke (Alexander Arsentyev), as if he is the latter’s reflection.

But then, like an alter ego taking hold, Kuzichev turns into a merciless autocrat scarily fast — as well as looking dangerously like Vladimir Putin from certain angles.

Having feigned a trip abroad while actually sneaking around undercover disguised as a friar, the duke stages a grand, red-carpet return for himself and — amid the roar of the masses and the click of paparazzi cameras — he punishes Angelo’s corrupt hypocrisy in a kind of multi-layered show trial that has more cunning twists than the winding dance of a rattlesnake.

This Measure for Measure is pointedly contemporary, with jack-booted military police slinging citizens into cells then puffing on cigarettes as they fill in paperwork. But it also reverberates way beyond present-day Russia.

The hushed central scenes are agonisingly riveting. The horror creeps up slowly as Angelo’s iciness mutates into sexual blackmail in his closeted negotiations with Isabella, the wimpled novice who wants her brother Claudio released from prison.

Anna Khalilulina’s Isabella combines youthful raw distress with a fiery revolutionary scorn for Angelo’s authority that knocks him backwards.

Donnellan’s combination of poignantly intimate naturalistic detailing and moments of demonic nightmarishness is unsettling, and it’s not just Angelo who proves to be harbouring taboo desires here.

The sharply filleted script (axing feeble comic sub-plots) generates a sense of whirling urgency but also fluid dreams within dreams. And the end is delicately heartbreaking, with estranged siblings and a wedding waltz trailing loneliness in its wake.