<i>Measure For Measure</i>, Shakespeare’s Globe, review: ‘sends unseasonal shivers down the spine’ by Dominic Cavendish for the Telegraph, 2 July 2015
High drama at the Globe on the hottest day of the year. Spectator flesh almost sizzles during the Measure for Measure matinee. Dazed-looking groundlings are rescued by vigilant volunteers; disoriented pigeons flap about madly; near me a parched woman faints – cue alarums within, as ushers and medics rally round.
Meanwhile on stage the company soldiers on, not a man or woman buckling. SAS recruits, training on exposed moors with full kit and heavy backpack, are a noble breed – but there’s glory too in sweating it out in tight period costume and spouting Shakespeare. Dominic Dromgoole – unveiling his final summer production as artistic director here after a strong, sceptics-defying decade – commands full loyalty. He realises, too, that the Bard inspires people to go the extra mile, even to the point of masochism; there were bumper box-office figures in 2014.
Aptly perhaps, this is a breezy, fair weather account of a problem play that can, with its vision of a Vienna that tilts violently from liberty and licentiousness into authoritarian repression and brazen corruption, assume a midnight darkness. As Vincentio, the Duke who hands power to his puritanical deputy Angelo, and then comes back to stalk the action and shape the outcome in a friar’s guise – Dominic Rowan emphasises his character’s lack of self-certainty. He’s a man who barely knows what he’s going to say, or do, next and giddily relishes that irresponsibility.
London Theater Review: ‘Measure for Measure’ at Shakespeare’s Globe by Matt Trueman for Variety, 2 July 2015
Departing artistic director Dominic Dromgoole bids farewell to the main stage of Shakespeare’s Globe with a “Measure for Measure” that demonstrates exactly why he’ll be missed. All the crowdpleasing color of Shakespeare’s Vienna is here, with character actors running rampant on and off the bare wooden stage, but there’s a strain of great thinking too. Mariah Gale’s remarkable Isabella puts in a display of quiet virtue in a production that excoriates both public displays of morality and pervy old men.
Dromgoole will officially bow out, as Shakespeare did, with “The Tempest” in February, staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His successor — a daring, inspired choice — will be Kneehigh’s Emma Rice. She has one Shakespeare credit to her name to date. Ten years ago, so did Dromgoole.
No matter. He has made the place his own, pushing what had looked like a tourist trap to find a performance vocabulary of its own. The bare wooden stage is now reconfigured for every show. Historical costumes are customized into significance. Mock historical re-enactments are out. Great actors are in. It’s been a huge success: Box office is through the roof (or it would be, if there was one), and all without a penny of public subsidy. Globe shows are boisterous, rugged, silly, clear-sighted, even, on occasion, beautiful. Audiences love them.
Measure for Measure review – excess all areas in Dromgoole’s Globe farewell by Michael Billington, for The Guardian, 2 July 2015
Shakespeare’s play positively seems to invite updating and has been set, at different times, in a Freudian and proto-fascist Vienna and a world of Guantánamo Bay surveillance. But Dominic Dromgoole, in his farewell production at a theatre he has served with distinction, shrewdly confronts Jacobean Puritan rigour with anarchic licentiousness. Even this, however, cannot solve all the play’s problems.
Dromgoole’s production is at its best in the confrontation of Isabella and Angelo.Mariah Gale plays the novice as a modest, quietly spoken figure of absolute spiritual certainty: she gives due weight to the line “why all the souls that were were forfeit once” – which the poet Thom Gunn said contained a whole world of invention – and literally comes to blows with her brother, Claudio, when he argues that she should sacrifice her chastity to save his life.
Kurt Egyiawan plays Angelo as a young man shocked into awareness of his dormant sensuality and his attraction to a woman whose downright fervour matches his own. When these two characters are together, the play grips the imagination. I was less sure what to make of Dominic Rowan as the Duke who, disguised as a friar, stage-manages much of the action. The key to his performance seems to be that the Duke is less a surrogate divinity than a frantic improviser and Rowan brings out well the hypocrisy of a man who one minute condemns a bawd and the next arranges a bed-trick in which Mariana will take the place of Isabella.
Read Full StoryA giant helping of bawd from the Bard, PATRICK MARMION reviews Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure for the MailOnline, 3 July 2015
One way of solving the problem of Shakespeare’s oddball play about sex, law and death is to turn it into a good old bawdy romp. This is the strategy adopted by Dominic Dromgoole for his valedictory production as Artistic Director at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Where sometimes the tale of the Duke of Vienna abandoning the debauched city to the zero tolerance of his deputy Angelo is taken seriously, Dromgoole chooses hearty satire.
The greatest pleasure is taken in the play’s disreputable triumvirate of bawds — Trevor Fox’s pimp Pompey, Petra Massey’s brothel keeper Mistress Overdone and Brendan O’Hea as their seedy regular, Lucio. They fall out of wheelbarrows, pull down the pants of defendants and cavort like randy primates.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s Globe, London — review by Sarah Hemming for the Financial Times, 3 July 2015
Dominic Rowan’s Duke Vincentio opens this Measure for Measure with his back turned to the audience. And well he might. For, amid the standing spectators in the courtyard, licentious Vienna is in full swing: drunken youths and gaudy women flirt and fight, attempting to coax unwitting members of the audience into small wooden bawdy houses dotted about the yard.
Dominic Dromgoole’s staging finds more broad comedy in this dark, troubling play than you might expect, excavating every dirty joke possible and introducing plentiful saucy slapstick. It’s fun, but it also quickly establishes the sweaty, messy reality of human desire. The laughter it provokes engages the audience in the moral argument: where, when it comes to sexual morality, would we draw the line? How would we apportion justice?
Read Full StoryMeasure for Measure review — bravado in merriment by Susannah Clapp for The Guardian, 5 July 2015
Five years ago, Rory Kinnear (currently starring in The Trial at the Young Vic) was a sidling, skin-crawling Angelo in Michael Attenborough’s Measure for Measure. In Dominic Dromgoole’s new production, Kurt Egyiawan makes the puritan-turned-sinner more vehement: it is hard to think his blood was ever merely “snow-broth”; his dip into lasciviousness is less surprising. Though it might seem madness to think of a jolly production of one of Shakespeare’s most troubling plays, Dromgoole’s staging comes near to that.
There is bravado in this merriment, a bravado that has marked Dromgoole’s running of the Globe, where this is his final production as artistic director. This is not a searing account of the play. It does not have one big governing idea; it does not offer Freudian touches or the spectacle of an incipient fascist state. Yet there is boldness in allowing the contradictions and the shifts of sympathy simply to pile up, with scenes bubbling as if you were on a pavement watching episodes from London street life, and the most beautiful voice of the season unleashed by Naana Agyei‑Ampadu.
Mariah Gale – in a punishing cap and shift – is a delicately balanced Isabella. I still think her character is something of a pill: “More than our brother is our chastity.” Yet, subdued, then flaring, she builds her arguments with exactness. No nudges towards current relevance are needed to point up the truth of a central exchange between her and Angelo. Her threat to expose him as a sexual predator is met with the calm assurance that no one would believe it of someone in his position.
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