Theatre review: Bard’s booty-shaking Measure for Measure

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Measure for Measure

When: To Sept. 20

Where: Sen̓áḵw/Vanier Park

Tickets and Info: From $30 at bardonthebeach.org

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” — a comedy disguised as a tragedy, with jarring contrasts in tone and a nasty device in the final act that delays the comic resolution at the sadistic expense of the play’s lone virtuous character.

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This summer, artistic director Christopher Gaze appears to have given the directors of Bard on the Beach‘s four plays complete licence to adapt and update their scripts. Director Jivesh Parasram has gone furthest with Measure for Measure, rewriting much of the play’s dialogue and turning Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Vienna into a disco apocalypse.

The often entertaining, often ridiculous free-for-all results in another kind of problem play altogether.

Parasram maintains Shakespeare’s plot. Duke Vincenzio temporarily leaves his post for a monastery from where he will keep an eye on things, turning the city over to Angelo, nicknamed Angelo the Pure for his strict righteousness. Angelo immediately shuts down the city’s brothels, and outlaws premarital sex on pain of death. Parasram changes the crime to premarital dancing.

When Claudio is condemned to die for impregnating Julietta, his sister Isabella, a nun, begs Angelo for Claudio’s life. Angelo lusts after Isabella and offers to spare Claudio in exchange for her having sex — or a dance — with him. Virtuous Isabella refuses, but the Duke sets up a sting with Mariana, Angelo’s betrothed, incriminating hypocritical Angelo and saving both Claudio’s life and Isabella’s virtue. The complicated plot is laced with low comic humour, especially from chorus-style Lucio.

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Parasram immerses us in the music (sound designer Chris Ross-Ewart), lighting (Hina Nishioka), and extreme late-’70s costumery (Alaia Hamer) of disco, with Kristal Kiran’s sometimes anachronistic choreography on Ryan Cormack’s night club/office/prison set. The Duke’s glitter-ball suit is sensational. And disco-dancing monks, what fun.

Scott Bellis, impressive as always, plays the Duke as a manic, dissolute old hipster — over the top, but sure enjoying himself. Lucio (Karthik Kadam) dances around, stealing scene after scene with his sarcastic remarks. Tess Degenstein’s Elbow, Shakespeare’s dumb and dumber constable, is a moustachioed cop with a thick cartoon-Austrian accent. Shakespeare’s unhappy Mariana (Leslie Dos Remedios) appears here as a sexy siren who can’t wait to get her hands all over Angelo.

They’re all having big fun speaking mostly English we can understand. Julietta (Degenstein) weeps for her “baby daddy” Claudio (Jeremy Lewis). In not quite iambic pentameter Lucio announces, “The night doth call and quaaludes I must acquire.” I was reminded of improv shows where the audience suggests a concept (“Shakespeare as disco!”) and the actors slide into that world, improvising ridiculous comic dialogue. 

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But Angelo (Craig Erickson) and Isabella (Meaghan Chenosky) operate in a different world of serious morality, self-analysis, real emotion, and pages of difficult Shakespearean dialogue. Both indulge in some of the play’s shtick: Isabella lip-syncs “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”; Angelo awkwardly hides his boner from Isabella. But in the production’s clash of tones and theatrical styles, the noisy fun-at-all-costs disco spirit drowns out any serious ideas emerging from their story.

Audience-friendly fun is never a bad idea in the theatre. I had fun at Parasram’s Measure for Measure, alternately laughing, cringing, and admiring its audacity. Just be prepared for Shakespeare at his booty-shakingest.

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