[In the following essay, Carlson reviews a Turkish production of Measure for Measure, lauding it as a radical, powerful, and effective staging of one of Shakespeare's most difficult comedies.]

The spring season announcement for the five stages that make up the National Theatre in Istanbul listed fifteen productions, one third of them Turkish plays, the rest an impressive selection of international classics (such as Goethe's Urfaust and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac) and modern works (such as Shaffer's Black Comedy and McNally's Maria Callas). One of the more unusual and provocative selections was a powerful and highly unconventional interpretation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in one of the National Theatre's larger spaces, the Taksim Sahnesi, staged by the much-admired artistic director, Nesrin Kazankaya. Besides directing, for which Nazankaya prepared with study in Germany, she has since 1980 also served as one of the leading actresses of the National Theatre.

Although this was easily the most radical adaptation of this difficult play I have ever witnessed, it was also unquestionably the most powerful and effective. Often in Shakespeare's later dark comedies, director and actor must struggle to come to terms with extreme actions whose motives are never explained. In no play is this more troubling than Measure for Measure, the machinery of which is set into motion and ultimately stopped by the mysterious Duke, whose reasons for the odd behavior that creates the play's action are never made clear.

Director Kazankaya's solution to this problem was to change radically the conditions of the Duke's departure, providing a much clearer motivation quite unlike anything hinted at in the original. In the opening scene, the Duke (Nihat Ileri) and Escalus (here played by an actress, Gönen Aykaç, so that the two seem an elderly couple) were frantically burning papers in two open censors on an upstage platform (fire and paper would be recurring motifs of this highly visual production). The reason for this activity was soon clear. A gang of terrorist-insurgents in obligatory fatigues and ski masks (the costuming was neutral but vaguely modern) soon burst into the room, seized and bound the couple. Their leader was Angelo, who had taken control of the state and who proceeded to set up a regime of puritan excess, showing the former Duke only the mercy of sending him into exile. Suddenly, we found ourselves moved from the dark fairytale world ordinarily presented by this strange play, to a far more familiar (perhaps especially here close to the Middle East) and because familiar, more frightening and immediately relevant world in which a usurper strong man assumes power and institutes a regime of prudish severity. Yetkin Dikinciler, a tall, burly, powerful figure was a frightening and convincing embodiment of Angelo, and contrasted sharply with the thin and gaunt Ileri, whose unruly shock of snow-white hair gave him something of the appearance of a Lear, until in disguise he tied it in a ponytail and hid it under a monk's hood.

The Duke's return in disguise, suggesting in the original something of the Haran al-Rashid tradition from the Arabian Nights, became a reasonable, if dangerous, response to the situation, and as the production continued, behind the main action were continual vignettes of mysterious hooded and masked figures, rushing here and there, or, more ominously, gathered around guttering candles in dark corners in a clearly conspiratorial manner. There was little doubt that the regime Angelo seized remained unstable and that new coups were constantly brewing. Not surprisingly, the figure of the disguised Duke was often observed among these furtive shapes. The spatially complex setting, designed by Gürel Yontan, was a great aid to this clandestine behavior. Composed basically of a high scaffold platform that ran across the upstage area, accessed from downstage by one main center staircase, the set came directly toward the audience, with a small staircase on either side. The crude newel post at the top of the stairs doubled as open fires or torchieres. Under this scaffolding, a warren of never totally illuminated spaces provided the major area for the comings and goings of conspirators.

This rather straightforward neutral setting was qualified in two important ways. First, the entire stage wall behind it gave the appearance of a dim industrial or fortress surface, regularly covered at about four foot intervals by projecting studs, while the main floor was a rumpled reddish cloth, extending out over the stage front into the audience. Second, and more striking, the action continually flowed out into the auditorium, which was architecturally integrated into the setting. An actor coming down the central staircase from the upper platform could keep moving straight ahead and descend another staircase at the front of the stage into a central aisle of the auditorium, and continue heading out the back of the house or, by taking a cross aisle, out the sides. The stage was extended beyond the proscenium, and the left and right walls of the auditorium connected with staircases that led up the front edges of the balconies. Enough of an aisle ran along the front of the balconies that actors could play scenes from there as well. The balcony and auditorium generally represented the “town” and from it came the clown figures, most notably the fast-talking Lucio (Ali Düşenkalkar) and Çaçamama (Sema Çeyrekbasi), who played the renamed Mistress Overdone almost entirely in Italian, a choice that the audience seemed to find appropriate and amusing, and which was a real god-send to this non-Turkish speaking observer.

The central part of the production followed Shakespeare much more closely than the beginning and end. Ayşe Lebriz was both powerful and vulnerable as Isabella, and the scene where Angelo is drawn to her was very effectively played, with just a hint of comedy, as Angelo at first scarcely noticed her, obsessed, as he frequently was, with sorting through endless papers, and then finally focused upon his intended prey.

The ending of the production departed as radically from the original as the beginning but perfectly complemented it. The revelation of the Duke was accompanied by the same show of force as that which opened the play, but this time the hooded followers of the Duke seized Angelo and his supporters. The Duke then set up a kind of tribunal and meted out judgments, beginning in a temperate fashion which became more maniacal as he continued. Mounting the central stairs, he turned the fury that in the original is directed toward the foolish Lucio toward the usurper Angelo, and as Angelo ascended the stairs to appeal to him in a sudden violent motion the Duke slit Angelo's throat. The other cast members fled the scene in horror, some through the wings, others, led by Isabella, through the audience. The Duke continued to rage at the top of the stairs, while striking backlighting accented his wild shock of white hair and suggested more than a little Lear upon the heath. In his fury he passed his hands repeatedly through the flames of the roaring torchieres on either side of him in seeming defiance of pain. The cycle of anger, violence, and betrayal had claimed its final victim and the curtain fell with the Duke, glowing in the feverish white back lighting in a sea of flames produced by red lighting, raging over the prostrate body of his nemesis.