Measure for Measure (Vol. 86) | Michael Billington (review date 5 May 2003)
Michael Billington (review date 5 May 2003)
SOURCE: Billington, Michael. Review of Measure for Measure. Guardian (5 May 2003): 18.
[In the following review, Billington critiques Sean Holmes's 2003 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Measure for Measure and finds fault with its overemphasis on the corruption of modern society.]
After its airborne Taming of the Shrew, the Royal Shakespeare Company comes back to earth with this problematic comedy. Sean Holmes's production has pace, energy and a fine Isabella in Emma Fielding; but its moral negativism seems a hangover from the director's recent work on The Roman Actor.
Holmes's boldest stroke is to set the action in 1940s Vienna: a hedonistic, war-battered world in which whores and black-marketeers haunt the streets and where you half expect to see Harry Lime scuttling into the sewers. But, although this gives the action a social context, it does little to...
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