Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Cheek by Jowl & Pushkin Theatre’s Measure for Measure (BAM)

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Isabella and her brother Claudio

The last dance hit the hardest. After a dizzying, painful, intense intermissionless two hours, she followed his lead. At first, when Isabella received the now-undisguised Duke’s marital offer, she seemed, as in some other recent productions I’ve seen, nonplussed and not interested. Anna Vardevanian, who gave a strong and sometimes enraged performance as the wanna-be nun, seemed a bit stunned. But I knew it was a bad sign when she let her long black hair down out of the nun’s habit she’d worn throughout the play. In the final tableau, she awkwardly folded herself into dance position. The Duke embraced her with the same creepy paternalism that Angelo had cooed when he assaulted her in the second interview scene (2.4). The music carried their bodies together. They skipped around the stage in the same arcs that Juliet and Claudio and Marianna and Angelo had just traced. Everything was in order. No freedom in Vienna, or in the contemporary Russia that it represents in this brilliant production.

One from inside the program

The only one to get away might have been Barnadine, the drunk convict played brilliantly by Igor Teplov. Despite his small role, Teplov got lots of stage time, since the full thirteen cast members spent most of the evening all on stage together, with anyone not speaking in a given scene watching on one side, or zooming about in a group to mark scene changes. When the group was together, Teplov, tall and striking, often stood at the head, in a kind of implicit leadership position. When he refused execution (4.3) and again when he was pardoned by the Duke (5.1), Barnadine staged the direct resistance no one else could quite manage. He struck the Duke-as-friar in the prison scene, and then he was the only one who could escape off-stage in the middle of the Duke’s re-assertion of political control (5.1). It was good to see him get loose, but I wished he’d taken Isabella with him.

Last year, during the #metoo fall of 2017, I saw Measure for Measure twice, in an experimental production by Elevator Repair Service at the Public Theater. The first time was three days before the first Weinstein story broke in the Times, and my blog review was mostly about the experiments. I went back a few weeks later on a cold, wet Election Day night & all I could think about was consent.

The production I saw this past Tuesday night, at BAM for only a week, restaged the legendary collaboration between Cheek by Jowl, one of my favorite London-based companies, with Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. The Russian-language production debuted in Moscow in 2013, played London in 2015, and is in the US for the first time this year [Correction: it played Chicago in 2016, and in Brooklyn only this week] in our second year of #metoo. Watching it, I wondered if, in these raw post-Kavanaugh & pre-mid-term days in the US, it’s possible to stomach this tale of hypocrisy, power, and women who suffer. It’s not the kind of show that leaves you happy.

Isabella inside the program

Before the show started I was thinking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, with her right hand raised, swearing to tell the truth. I thought of her quite a bit over the course of the evening. 
The men hogged center stage, as usual.
Andrei Kuzichev performed a well-dressed Angelo as a slowly thawing ice cube, pleasingly short, vain about his appearance, at first soothing and then shockingly brutal when he tried to shush Isabella in 2.4 as he began to undress her. When confronted with his long-lost Marianna in act 5, he turned opaque and quiet, as if receding in importance now that the Duke had openly returned to the city.
Alexander Arsentyev’s Duke began the play as the first member of the cast to separate himself from the group, who were at this point all gathered together. In a production that took its politics seriously, the Duke opened by attempting to control over his on-stage companions, with only partial success. The night ended with the Duke organizing a quasi-fascist rally in the final scene, with canned applause responding to all his cues. In between, he presented an odd mix of bully and goofball. He seemed especially foolish when he accidentally showed several people in the prison his hidden identity, but given that the Duke represents authority — an authority that, in this production’s Moscow context, has a particular sinister cast — I didn’t trust my own occasional sympathy for him. When he waltzed Isabella into submission he seemed quite horrid, but as with his political opposite, Barnadine, I wondered at how much this figure kept the spotlight on himself, rather than on the women at the drama’s center.
In the category of men-bef0re-Isabella, I can’t resist one brief mention of Petr Rykov’s Claudio, who when he returned from his supposed execution in the final scene (5.1), refused the open embrace of the sister who had herself refused to sacrifice her virtue for his life earlier. He rejected his sister and turned instead to Juliet and their baby. Isabella’s isolation at that moment was painful. It made her easier pickings for the smiling Duke and his dancing feet.
Isabella herself was the supreme athlete of virtue that Angelo imagined himself to be before he failed his own test. In their first scene together, the impassioned Isabella grabbed Angelo by his starched collar and accused him of what she did not yet know he was guilty of:
Go to your bosom / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault (2.2)
The panic on Angelo’s face would later bleed into cruelty and desire. Isabella’s power showed itself in a few other moments, including her public introduction of Marianna and her initial turn away from the proposing Duke in the final scene, but unlike Barnadine she couldn’t get away.
It’s hard to watch this play, though it’s clearly the play that speaks most directly and painfully to #metoo and what I desperately hope is a last gasp of visible misogyny in our public culture.
In October 2016, when I didn’t yet know that the world was about to end, I took a group of students to see a stage play based on The Rape of Lucrece a few days after we all heard the Access Hollywood tape in which our future leader bragged about committing sexual assault. I was worried about it all being too much, but the show, the students, and maybe even the deep artistic bones of Shakespeare rose to the challenge. Something similar happened last night at BAM. Art speaks to power, misogyny, and violence. It hasn’t managed to stamp out those things yet, but I suppose that’s our job.
The Pushkin/CbJ Measure is only at BAM for one week. Get to the Harvey Theater!

Inside the lobby at the Harvey Theater