1979 BBC Shakespeare Production
This adaptation, directed by Desmond Davis, starred Kenneth Colley as Duke; Kate Nelligan as Isabella; Tim Pigott-Smith as Angelo; Christopher Strauli as Claudio; John McEnery as Lucio; Jacqueline Pearce as Mariana; and Frank Middlemass as Pompey.
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Kate Nelligan as Isabella in the 1979 film production. Image by ZUMA Press, Inc., via Alamy. [Used under license.]
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Henry Fenwick, discussing “The Production” (18–25) in the booklet the BBC published to coincide with the first broadcast of the play, quoted producer Cedric Messina as saying that “the play’s real power lies in the two great interviews between Angelo and Isabella,” with the latter role as crucial. He felt that “the play would be enhanced by television because of the smallness of the confrontations, the duologues between the characters. There’s no real need for scenic background, just terrific intensity between these two people. Television brings that out enormously” (18). Director Desmond Davis, who had never before directed a Shakespeare play, wanted to appeal to a young audience of non-Shakespeareans and wanted to emphasize darkness and mist in the setting, so that “it only becomes daylight in act V when the whole thing’s resolved” (19). Noting some problems with the text of the play, Fenwick reported that “script editor Alan Shallcross nevertheless did not prune much and that most of the pruning involved cutting lines involving stage entrances and exits and was also intended to make sense of the play’s conclusion” (19). Fenwick offered a long discussion of the inconsistencies and confusions relating to time schemes in this play (20–21); noted that in order to deal with some crowd scenes, some improvised Elizabethan lines had to be added (21); quoted Odette Barrow, this production’s costume designer, to explain the difficulty of acting in stiff early Jacobean costumes (which is why she also drew on some Italian designs from the same era); and reported that Messina considered the Duke a complex, even mystifying character who in some ways behaves as confusingly as God. Messina thought that Angelo should seem stronger than the Duke in the opening scenes; saw the Duke as a “withdrawn figure” and thought him not a particularly good source of authority in the city, partly because he was too passive (22). Kate Nelligan, playing Isabella, rejected the idea that this character is sexually repressed, instead seeing her as “an incredibly strong-minded, eloquent, genuine, feeling, warm good woman who’s caught in an intolerable position. … It seems to me perfectly acceptable that moral good and evil are forces which people will lay down their lives for. [Isabella’s behavior] comes from a convinced passion—a passionate belief.” Meanwhile, Davis, the director, suggested that “Shakespeare really wrote, between Angelo and Isabella, a sort of mirror image of two people: They have a lot of the same qualities—both rather emphatic in their judgements, both without tremendous breadth of imagination, both of them wanting to be right and good.” He therefore found “a very natural clash between them” (23), although, in filming them, he emphasized some differences: “He was rather large, shot from waist level, and she was a minute figure, shot using the whole depth of the room. Then slowly they come together.” The production’s set designer, Stuart Walker, had Angelo sit behind a very large desk to imply his efficiency, his authority, his ability to intimidate people, and his unwillingness to deal with his own psychological problems, and in fact both Walker and Davies were interested in compelling images, some of them involving rapid alterations from one place to another, such as the brothel and the convent, which were actually the same set transformed from whorehouse to place of prayer (24), and indeed, various parts of the set were transformed into various other settings: in one case the camera tracked around the set eight times to give the impression that it was moving through long streets. Such decisions made this production seem more like a film than a standard television program (it did not rely simply on close ups), although the end of the play was deliberately filmed as if it were a theatrical production because the Duke is, in a sense, there directing a play, and he light emphasized at the end of the production emphasizes Measure for Measure’s positive final themes (25).
Kate Nelligan as Isabella in the 1979 film production.
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Image by ZUMA Press, Inc., via Alamy. [Used under license.]
J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their 1988 helpful critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, cited and quoted from numerous reviews from 1979. One in the London Times called the BBC production a “vital contemporary performance, full of irony and black humour” but considered “Kenneth Colley … strangely miscast [as the Duke].” Another, in a scholarly journal, saw a tragic emphasis in this version, while a writer for the Los Angeles Times praised the acting in general and Kate Nelligan’s in particular. Both key women actors were praised in the Washington Post, which said that the whole production worked “splendidly and gladdeningly,” while a review by a major scholar in the Shakespeare Quarterly called this broadcast “the most brilliant success of the [BBC] series so far,” especially thanks to “the incredibly charged confrontations between Tim Pigott-Smith’s Angelo and Kate Nelligan’s Isabella.” Saying that the performance “cohere[d] as a bitter comedy,” this reviewer wrote that “Desmond Davis’ Measure for Measure succeeded by the intelligence of its conception, beautifully rendered by the actors,” adding, “It is the only production of the series so far that one wants to compare to memorable performances in the theatre” (255).
Virginia Carr, reviewing this adaptation in 1979 for the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, praised the performances of the “uniformly well-acted minor roles”; called the production “consistently solid”; but faulted Colley’s inconsistent and confusing performance as the Duke, saying he had “no ducal presence.” Carr was puzzled by this duke’s decision to withdraw and thought that Colley’s Duke “seems incongruously insecure,” especially when proposing to Isabella. But Carr thought that Kate Nelligan presented a complex Isabella by “human[izing] the role”; called the first two exchanges between her and Piggot-Smith “superb”; and said that they “effectively portray sexual tension.” She admired the settings and costumes; considered the “crowd scenes” and the “broad comedy … peculiarly lifeless” (4); but nonetheless called this Measure for Measure “one of the best performances in this year’s series partly because it is well acted and well directed, but mainly because much of it is especially suited to the small screen” (5).
H. R. Coursen, in a 1984 essay titled “Why Measure for Measure?,” wrote that “Davis’ fine Measure for Measure opens our expectations for the [television] medium towards the deeper definitions of the unconscious. Davis was not, consciously, attempting to do this, of course, but a good director’s instincts take him and his play in directions that challenge the shallow one-dimensionality of a medium that can deal ‘in depth.’ This production,” he thought, “proves the point. If our expectation of the medium incorporates only what it usually gives us, then we are as diminished as we would be were our expectations of our unconscious activity reduced only to the effects of those damned onions we had in the salad. Davis’ production,” he asserted, “based on a play already framed for a medium undreamt of in Shakespeare’s philosophy, released the meaning latent in this ambiguous script. That meaning is, simply put, ‘With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again, measure still for measure’” (69).
Herbert R. Coursen, in his 1992 book Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation, called the BBC Measure for Measure “one of the best” of the whole series, emphasizing that this play “seems almost to have been written for television,” not only because it is “melodramatic and episodic” but also because it features “a series of vivid one-on-one confrontations” (202). He praised “the face of Kate Nelligan” as “a face figuring itself out” and wrote that the “relative stiffness of the two scenes between Angelo and Isabella … make[s] a point,” noting that the “ducal palace itself is a sober, almost Calvinistic zone of oaken furniture, inlaid flooring, and intricate leaded glass, a suitable setting for Tim Piggot-Smith’s arrogant Angelo” (203). Calling “Davis’s camera … always alert to emotional nuance” (203), he suggested that “the final scene of this production deliberately constitutes a ‘play within the play.’” Coursen commented that although he had “always found the Duke’s manipulations [there] distasteful, Davis allows” for a more positive interpretation, “showing us only that Vincentio’s elaborate mechanism ‘works.’” Thus, “While Davis gives us an image-conscious Duke, the production does not necessarily condemn him for that,” so that finally “Davis’s treatment probes the question of Vincentio effectively. The production does not coerce either script or spectator into any black-and-white interpretation,” treating its audience as Shakespeare treated his—“as reasonably intelligent human beings” (204).
Stuart Hampton-Reeves, in his 2007 book on Measure for Measure for the Shakespeare Handbook series (131–35), called the BBC production “stagy and sometimes very static” (131) and discussed such defects as actors “perform[ing merely] to each other” (132) and a cast of men who all seemed “weak and under-confident,” with Angelo (“the worst of them all”) coming across as “a smug young buck dressed in black like a pantomime villain” (133). He thought “the play’s women [were] strong people with little self-doubt”; called Isabella “an inwardly tough young woman” who seems “thoughtful but inscrutable” and who makes “a political rather than a psychological decision to be the Duke’s wife” (134) so that the production might have “the happy ending it wanted” (135). Meanwhile, Samuel Crowl, in his 2008 Norton Guide, praised in passing the acting of Nelligan and Piggott-Smith (70–71).
Assessing the BBC production in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (285–87), Peter Cochran discussed the difficulty of casting the duke effectively; called most of the cast here “first rate” (285); highly praised this production’s Angelo and Isabella (especially when they are in dialogue); but considered this version’s duke less than wholly effective, finding him too superficial, too cocky (286), and too unfeelingly manipulative (287).
1994 David Thacker Production
This adaptation, directed for television by David Thacker and set in the 1990s, starred Tom Wilkinson as Duke Vincentio; Corin Redgrave as Angelo; and Juliet Aubrey as Isabella.
Herbert R. Coursen, in his 2002 book Shakespeare in Space (59–66), spent much of this discussion comparing and contrasting this production with the one directed by Desmond Davis for the BBC, finding the two versions mutually illuminating and admiring them both but for different reasons. Coursen called the Thacker version “warmer” than the BBC adaptation (61), termed Corin Redgrave’s Angelo “dour and middle-aged” (62), and called the duke “ponderous and humorless” (63), although he did write that the “underparts here are splendid” (65).
In his 2007 overview of the play (130–31, 135–40), Stuart Hampton-Reeves noted that the Thacker production is hard to find (130) but called it “the most daring film there has been of the play, and the only one to see it as a dark satire of contemporary media politics” (131). He considered it “more televisual than theatrical”; noted how it “mixed elements of the past and present” (135); considered the duke a “world-weary melancholic” who is “lethargic and pacified by drink, television, and too much thought” (136); and said that the script had been edited “to allow for more rapid cuts between scenes” (137). Writing that “Isabella emerged as the only moral force in a world caught between depressive liberality and oppressive surveillance” (138), Hampton-Reeves thought that “most of the characters were [alienated] from their society” (139) and that the production ended with a final emphasis on “unconsoling loneliness” (140).