The Duke of Vienna appoints a deputy in a time of crisis. The Deputy proclaims martial law, closing brothels and other spaces of public resort. Sex outside marriage is banned. A young man has slept with his girlfriend, and she is pregnant. The young man must then be executed. The new Deputy is severe, puritanical. He will spare the young man – but only if the young man’s sister, soon to become a nun, will sleep with him.

It’s the clearest sequence of sexual harassment in Shakespeare. The scenes between the nun, Isabella, and the lustful Deputy, Angelo, are riveting. Shakespeare’s investigation of sexual ethics makes perfect sense to the #metoo generation. Then, too, the play’s warnings about the excess power of the state have a lockdown ring to them. We stay home, trusting that our leaders are as wise and benign as, every weekday at 1pm, they appear to be. 

The play, then, is deeply serious: yet you’ll find it in the ‘comedies’ section of Shakespeare’s complete works, and it contains a good deal of knockabout farce, with ridiculous servants and a kind hearted brothel keeper. The central premise of the play is brought to a conclusion through an outrageous series of contrivances and devices taken from folklore and the floating pool of European tales that Shakespeare and his contemporaries loved. 

I was keen to watch this Globe production from 2015, partly because it will clearly be several years before any of us can think of watching a play by the River Thames again, and partly to see how the director, Dominic Dromgoole, managed the balance of tragedy, farce and yes romance, as three marriages conclude the play. 

The London Globe stage always looks handsome, with its pretty faux marble pillars. In this production there’s a bit of thematic set dressing to the left of the main upstage entrance doors: an assemblage of a skull, a cross and rosary beads; a reminder that the play deals searchingly with the idea of preparing for death (though nobody actually dies in the play itself), and that Shakespeare thinks of Vienna as a Catholic, Italianate city – a northern extension, if you like, of the Verona of Romeo and Juliet. Two chairs are used frequently, for authority figures to sit on, and the trap door is used for prison sequences (the worst of the prisoners come up from below) and, as is the Globe custom, the yard with the  groundling audience is often used for entrances, as when the Duke returns in state at the beginning of Act 5.

In other words the production sticks pretty close to the main stream of the Globe’s simulation of Renaissance staging. The actors mine the audience often, especially to indicate moments in the script where most modern audiences will feel the plot has become absurd. Dominic Rowan, as the Duke who spends most of the play dressed up as a friar, is especially good at ironically playing around with these moments. But that is not all the play has to offer and here the production departs significantly from the Auckland Pop-up Globe production, which toured New Zealand in the winter of 2019, garishly decked out in day-glow colours and performed with a kind of blowsy relish. [This paragraph was edited for greater accuracy on 17/06/20.]

In the London Globe the players are at home with bawdiness, and unafraid of jollying the crowd along. But they shift gears adroitly for the scenes, as searching as anything Shakespeare wrote, where issues of mercy, justice, power and gender relations come under severe pressure. Maria Gale as Isabella is exceptional as the play’s moral centre, drawing us in to every moment of moral anguish. She can save her brother but only by trading away everything she holds dear. Gale’s performance is eloquent, spare, powerful, and carries the high points of the play. The rest of the cast turn in solid, if not scintillating performances.

All in all this is a very solid version of the Shakespeare’s Globe house style, with beautifully made early 17^th century costumes in natural dye colours. Though it is in the pay section of what the Globe offers online, the charge is modest and you won’t be disappointed. You might even find yourself clapping along with the stirring all cast jig, to the tune of a gypsy-inspired violin theme which ends the show. The audience has had its pleasure, but is finally left with food for further thought.

See it here.

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