Young Vic,London
A snappily and furious staging of one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays retains a shaded heart despite its comic toneThe opening scene of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s staging of degree for degree is full of inflatable dolls. Whenever the Duke or Isabella or Angelo want to make speeches approximately being pure in a licentious world, they hold to wade through tumbles of bouncy pink bodies, or painted with mouths like vulvas,their arms upstretched like rampant cocks. Miriam Buether’s design looks grotesque but jaunty. It is actually a 21st-century version of a medieval hell.
This is Hill-Gibbins’s skill. The text is cut; the action moves snappily, with swaggering gangsters and comic zest. Yet the centre is unshiftingly shaded. degree for degree has some of Shakespeare’s most reverberating speeches – “Ay, and but to die,and go we know not where”. It is turning from a “problem” to a well-liked play: the Young Vics is the third production this year. Yet it’s elusive, slippery. Vienna is corrupt – and bubbling with prurience. Is the Duke who patrols the city in disguise a righteous leader or a manipulative scoundrel? Is Angelo, or the supposed guardian of morality,really a fallen angel or was he always a crook? How much is it possible to sympathise with the principled Isabella, who refuses to give up her chastity to save her brother?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com