One recent RSC production of Measure for Measure set the play in a Viennese bondage club, complete with half-naked men straining at neck braces and ankle chains. In her new production for Oxford Theatre Guild, director Cate Field goes to the opposite extreme — she has set Shakespeare’s enigmatic, dark comedy of power, repression, and sexuality in 21st-century, small town America.

“It’s a religion-soaked, fairly conservative area, which really matches the characters in the play,” Cate explains when we meet at a rehearsal. “It may be 400 years since Measure for Measure was written, but the characters seem very contemporary.

“I’m interested in American current affairs and politics, and it seemed to click,” Cate adds. “It’s remarkable that all the themes you read in the play — religion, political discourse, and the attitudes to people’s private moral choices — they are all things that you see in conservative areas of America. You can’t get into politics without stating your position on things like abortion and gay marriage.”

But, I suggest, when politicians take a high moral tone about such issues, they don’t always practise what they preach.

“That’s one of the fascinating things,” Cate agrees. “I think we’re very cynical about people who go into politics here in Britain. In the US, they still expect their politicians to be God-fearing, married, and squeaky clean. There’s this façade of ‘I go to church every Sunday, and of course I love my wife and five children’. Then they turn out to be having an affair with their intern. It’s all very pertinent to Shakespeare’s plotline for Angelo in Measure for Measure — his outward appearance is put to the test.”

This being America, Duke Vincentio has become “Vince the Dook”. He’s played by Alistair Nunn.

“I see him as a kind of Governor figure, someone who can trace his lineage quite far back,” Alistair says. “I think he’s been elected because of his family background, and will continue to be re-elected because of that. He’s looking for re-engagement with the world, he very much goes among the people and tries to talk with them.”

But he’s often described as a “flawed” character?

“That’s true. But if he didn’t really care what the people thought, I think he’d just do all the dirty work that he’s hiring Angelo to carry out for him. I think he’s quite concerned about what people feel about him, and he’s trying to hit a balance between his more intellectual, thinking side, and a more ruthless, leadership side.”

Angelo is the Duke’s deputy, and is played by Craig Finlay. “He has a much stricter moral outlook than the Duke,” Craig says. “He’s whiter than white to start with, but doesn’t realise the power temptation can have over him.”

And that’s especially true when Angelo encounters the pious Isabella — it’s as if he has never met a girl before.

“She definitely wants to be a nun – unlike me,” laughs the Theatre Guild’s Isabella, Jessica Reilly. “I don’t think a convent would take me!

“I think Isabella is very forgiving, and open in many ways. Once she’s realised that Angelo has a chance of redemption, then she believes in allowing him to be forgiven and start his life again.”

As the cast prepares to go back to rehearsals, I ask director Cate if she has revised her view of the play as she’s gone along?

“I’ve come to realise more and more that this is a story of a whole community, not just the principal characters. It comes out that everyone knows everybody’s business, which I guess is small town life!”

 

North Wall Arts Centre
October 23-26
Tickets: 01865 319450
or www.thenorthwall.com