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Measure For Measure
Playwright - William Shakespeare
Director - Hamish Glen and Stephen Stenning
Designer - Gregory Smith
Lighting Designer - Jeanine Davies
Company - Dundee Resident Company/Community Company Co-production
Venue - Dundee Rep
Dates - Previews
9 & 12 March at 7:45pm
13 - 30 March 2002 not Suns at 7:45pm Matinees on 16 & 23 March
at 2:30pm
Reviewer - Thelma Good
Doesn't find full measure
With 6 of the ensemble Rep company and 22 community actors this Shakespeare
has quite a crowd on stage at times. Ron Whyte's and Peter Arnott's adaptation
puts modern Scots into the play and cuts into the Shakespearean text too.
This adaptation gives some enlivening effect to the common people, particularly
in the character of Pompey, a pimp and, as the programme notes, generally
dodgy man. The part is played by Community actor, Paul D Clarke
who provides much comic relief and raw but effective talent too. But,
as often the case when Scots is used, the vocabulary isn't extensive enough
to really gie it laldie* .
Ensemble actor John Ramage provides another of his well judged
performances as the puritanical Angelo left to look after the Duke's Vienna
while he goes off. Unknown to all the Duke, Sandy Neilson, returns
disguised as a Friar to find that his appointee has evoked a long forgotten
law making sexual immorality a capital crime. Claudio who has made Juliet
pregnant is the first to get flung into the clink and his sister Isabella,
Emily Winter, goes to plead for her brother's life from Angelo.
Winter's Isabella has just the right note of purity so she's more
credible in her decision not to yield than often seen.
Angelo decides to see if she will trade her honour for her brother's life
but she, a noviciate nun, isn't up for it at all. Robert Paterson,
the new member of the ensemble is Escalus, Angelo's second in command,
a weak man who in this intrepretation expresses anger in one note losing
some of the depth of the character. Ensemble member Alexander West
is a largely dashing Lucio, a slick piece of rough and Anne Howie
another community actor does well as Mariana Angelo's spurned lover
from long ago.
This production has individual good performances and scenes, Pompey dragged
across the stage to prison whilst telling us his trade of pleasure is
better than that of money and the executioner preparing to instruct her
new, coerced apprentice. But these don't entirely redeem an overly long
production lasting nearly 3 hours. The Community Company members though
have some fine characterisations as the immoral nightlife Angelo tries
to banish. The production as a whole doesn't find full measure in the
combined Dundee companies for Shakespeare's tragicomedy.
© Thelma Good 13 March 2002
* gie it laldie - do it exuberantly
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