[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 illuminate the central debate between justice and mercy. Even though there are hints of Vienna's yearning for fascistic order, one is mildly surprised to find execution regarded as a punishment for fornication in the milieu of The Third Man.

The overall intention is presumably to stress the hypocrisy of power. Daniel Evans's Angelo is a petty bureaucrat in rimless specs astonished to find himself deputed to run the city. But, although he twitches nervously at the sight of Isabella, you never sense the shock of a man of rigid principle overcome by sensual appetite. Paul Higgins does little to clear up the mystery surrounding the disguised Duke. Jumping up and down excitedly when he hears of Ragozine's death, and making a move on Isabella in prison, he simply comes across as a fast-talking cynic with no fixed beliefs. The attack on false appearances would be more effective if either Angelo or the Duke exuded real authority in the first place.

It is left to Fielding's Isabella to provide the moral centre. The stock argument against the character is that she inhumanly elevates her chastity above her brother's life. But Fielding eloquently persuades us that it would be a mortal sin for a novice of Saint Clare to sacrifice her virginity; and when she refers, in her encounter with Angelo, to “he, which is the top of judgment”, she makes us believe in her faith. Eventually she responds sufficiently to the Duke's advances to imply that she, too, is tainted by the prevailing falsity, neatly pinpointed by John Lloyd Fillingham's Lucio. And this, to me, is the production's flaw. It has bags of surface vivacity and some nice music from Adrian Lee. But, in implying that church and state are inherently corrupt, it seems closer to the cynicism of Graham Greene than to the complexity of Shakespeare's version of the Sermon on the Mount.