PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol (Weds 12 Oct)

It’s a brave move staging semi-open-air Shakespeare in October, but we’ve come to expect nothing less of Bristol’s increasingly prolific Roughhouse Theatre having lit up the Ustinov with its first 24-hour play bonanza in May, and having recently reinvented Camus’s searing existentialist psychodrama ‘L’Etranger’ for the 9/11 generation at The Brewery.

Tonight’s performance of ‘Measure for Measure’ (running in rep with ‘The Two Gentleman of Verona’) also represents a resurgence of sorts, unfolding in the undulating, tomb-strewn grandeur of Arnos Vale cemetery, perhaps surprisingly underused by theatre companies given its enormous potential for gothic, elemental site-specific performance.

It’s utterly spectacular at times, most notably when a penitent, pious Isabella (Moira Hunt, pictured) stoops, back to the audience, to offer up prayer at the door of an enormous chapel under spotlight, bearing the pain and determination of a resolute Joan of Arc.

There are however, odd lines lost to the wind and some backdrops – the café, complete with disinterested barman in full view – threaten to occasionally break the spell.

That said, the ambulatory nature of proceedings imbues the production with a heightened mood of energy and progression – a sense of an insidious new order prevails as we’re marched towards the Anglican Chapel with Lord Escalus’s prophecy “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall” ringing in our ears.

Inside, the close-up deceptions and depositions begin, and it’s here, with taut direction and imaginative staging (Claudio’s cell residing in the pulpit annexe, for example), that the play cuts its most dramatic shapes. Robert Harper’s steel-eyed Duke-in-disguise is direct and dignified as he issues advice and decree upon his backbiting Viennese cousins; Feargus Woods Dunlop – arch, jocular and raffish – revels in his turn as the flirtatious, duplicitous Lucio; and the repertory ensemble work very hard to wring the drama, retribution and relief from the multi-pronged denouement.

‘Measure…’ has, and continues to be, dubbed a comedy, and a “problem” comedy at that, but this production fairly whips along, juicing laughs from unexpected places and delivering all the sacrifice, powerlust and politicking that suffuse what, in Roughhouse’s hands, feels a thoroughly modern tale. (Joe Spurgeon)

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011