The Wharf Theatre Devizes

Measure for Measure at The Wharf Theatre, Devizes

‘Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.’ Matthew 7: 1-2

From this and other biblical quotes comes the title and theme of Shakespeare’s play, which was first performed at the court of James 1st on the 26th December 1604.

‘Dealing with hypocrisy in government, the abuse of power and the silencing of women, Measure for Measure is an irresistible choice for a modern-dress production. It has the power, four hundred years on, to genuinely startle us with its relevance.’ Liz Sharman, Director.

I confess to having been quite daunted at the prospect of reviewing a Shakespeare play. I’m all for a long word but there really are rather a lot of them all together and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. In addition to that the parallels with the society of today are many and various and almost too glaringly obvious to mention.

‘Political chicanery. Abuse of position. Misogyny. Lying when in office. Sexual impropriety. Leaders breaking their own rules. No – it’s not Westminster!’ Ian Diddams (Pompey).

I went on Monday, which was the first night of the run. As mentioned above, the cast wore modern dress (with a seventies feel). The stage was painted black and bare; the absence of clutter and decoration on the stage leaving the mind free to concentrate on and relish the richness of the language. With the odd prop and sprinkling of light of different shapes and hues to indicate changes of scene, and music and sound used sparingly to the same end; a little mediaeval here, a bit of classical there, a bit of rock, tolling bells, and birdsong; a sombre atmosphere was created that entirely fitted the subject material.

Duke Vincentio leaves Vienna in the hands of his deputy Angelo, and disguises himself as a monk to observe how Angelo enforces the laws that he himself has let slide over the years, saying ‘hence shall we see, if power change purpose, what our seemers be’. Angelo immediately cracks down and brings back some ancient laws, particularly in relation to brothels and sexual behaviours, and sentences Claudio, the brother of the virtuous aspiring nun Isabella, to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant out of wedlock. When Isabella finds out that Claudio is to die she pleads with Angelo, who is suddenly overpowered with feelings of lust and love and proposes that she save her brother’s life by letting him have his wicked way with her.

It all gets a bit dark at this point and there is a rather disturbing scene in which Angelo tries to dominate Isabella by pulling her hair covering off. ‘To whom should I complain?’ asks Isabella afterwards.

Perhaps it is possible to watch Measure for Measure without being reminded of the murder of Sarah Everard and the policing of subsequent demonstrations, the current situation of women in Iran, and the recent revelations about the low rate of rape convictions in the UK and misogyny within the Met, but I didn’t manage it.

This scene was particularly well acted by Simon Carter as the dour and unforgiving Angelo, and Eleanor Smith in her Wharf debut as the innocent Isabella. Other scenes in which these two excelled in their passionate delivery were the scene in which Angelo is surprised by the suddenness and depth of his feelings, and the scene where Isabella gives Claudio, played by the always watchable Oli Beech, a piece of her mind for suggesting that his life might be worth more than her virtue.

As well as much morality to mull on there is many a mirthful moment in Measure for Measure, mostly delivered by the ebullient Ian Diddams as Pompey Bum the Bawd (resplendent in a gold shirt familiar to his fans) and the magnificent Lesley Scholes as Mistress Overdone, both of whom were made for such roles, and the rather strange Barnadine, who was covered with so much hair I couldn’t tell who played him! I also enjoyed Paul Snook as the crafty Lucio’s wit and word play, and Tor Burt’s gentle delivery of Mariana’s lines. Interesting and thought-provoking characters were Duke Vincentio (described as ‘the old fantastical duke of dark corners’ by Lucio), played in enigmatic and conspiratorial fashion by Pete Wallis, and the Provost, Jessica Bone, who seemed to be the only straightforward and truly merciful representative of the law in the play.

It’s not my place to criticise Shakespeare but at one point someone sleeps with someone pretending to be someone else and because it is dark nobody knows that they are sleeping with the wrong person (the bed trick) and also someone’s head is cut off but it’s not the head of the actual person it’s supposed to be but because they are dead nobody notices (the head trick) and I find both those things completely unlikely but I guess that’s poetic licence for you.

In the end everyone, with perhaps but not necessarily the exception of Isabella, has been taught a lesson about justice and how we shouldn’t be removing specks from each other’s eyes before getting out the planks from our own.

What of Duke Vincentio though? Was he lazy, sneaky, incredibly wise, or all of the above? Because in the end it seemed that he might be just as capable of riding roughshod over a woman’s wishes to satisfy his own desires as anyone else was. Perhaps no-one is all of anything, and Shakespeare leaves us to make up our own minds about him and his final question to Isabella unanswered.

The prose and poetry in the play is glorious, and so much easier to understand in performance than on the page. There are so many chuckleworthy turns of phrase – ‘groping for trouts in a peculiar river’ being one of my favourites – and philosophical and potentially dangerous questions to stimulate and confuse the mind, such as ‘They say, best men are moulded out of faults’, and ‘Might there not be a charity in sin…’.

There have been many words written about Shakespeare and his meanings and motivations over the years, but whatever his intent he has left us in Measure for Measure a play that begs huge moral questions, acknowledges everyone’s fallibility and humanity, and gives you a good laugh to boot.

The Wharf’s production on the first night wasn’t perfect. There were a few lines forgotten for a moment, and it took a while to warm up, but all in all it was very well done by an experienced cast and incredibly engaging. The theatre wasn’t packed but it will be by the end of its run, and I wasn’t the only person to have felt privileged and thrilled to enjoy a bit of Shakespeare in our beautiful theatre.

I asked the people in the row in front of me for a few, well three to be exact, words to describe their experience. ‘Jolly good evening!’ and ‘Thoroughly enjoyed it!’ they said, and on the way out I heard a lady say to her friend with some surprise that she had understood it all.

One has to wonder what the relatively new King James 1st would have thought of being presented with such a stark message about government and morality.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t until 1660 that women were even allowed to be on the stage at all, and that all the women’s parts in the original play would have been played by men.

If you get the chance to see Shakespeare at The Wharf this week or ever in the future, give it a go; you’ll be hugely entertained and supporting quality theatre in Devizes by doing so.

And if you’re less than familiar with the plot of the play or Shakespeare generally there’s no crime in having a quick Google. No-one needs to know. Not that I did or anything…

© Gail Foster 29th March 2023

Images of Pete Wallis as Duke Vincentio and Eleanor Smith as Isabella by Gail Foster

The Caretaker at The Wharf Theatre, Devizes; a review

 

On Friday night I had the pleasure of seeing Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, directed by Lewis Cowen and dedicated by him to the memory of the late and lovely Rosemary Shaw, at our wonderful Wharf Theatre.

Much has been written about the Nobel prize winning Pinter’s plays that he seems to have rejected as being irrelevant, including the term ‘comedy of menace’ and comments about ‘Pinteresque pauses’. The Caretaker is said to have been inspired by the playwright’s own experiences of living in relative poverty and his observations of the comings and goings of acquaintances in Chiswick in the 50s and was first performed in 1960.

It’s a play about three blokes in a room with a bucket waiting for something to happen.  The absurdist influence of Beckett, with whom Pinter had a mutually beneficial creative relationship, is strong in this one.

The production began and ended with, according to my fellow back row enthusiasts (it’s a leg room thing), the sound of Charmaine by Mantovani, with rain noises and the occasional timely knell of a drip in a bucket punctuating the uncomfortable silences.  The shabby and well designed set consisted of two old beds, a window with a tattered net and a light bulb without a shade, odd planks of wood leaned up against flaky-painted walls, a toaster with a broken plug, a pristine Buddha on an empty stove, and numerous other pieces of scrap that only a hoarder might consider to have any kind of potential.

Mick (played by Stuart Mayling), a man with a van, and his brother Aston (Pete Wallis), a quiet and slow moving person with plans for a shed, appear to live in a semi-derelict house in West London where nothing much happens, until one night in winter when Aston rescues a tramp from a fight and brings him home to stay for a while in order to help him get back on his feet.  Davies (Lewis Cowen) proves to be a demanding, ungrateful, racist, and manipulative house guest who comes with a multitude of unlikely stories and particular paranoias, and the play deals with how these three very different but all seemingly broken in some way characters relate to each other in the claustrophobic environment of the room.

There is only one moment when all three appear to be truly on the same page in this play, and that is the moment when a drip drops noisily into the bucket and they all look up at the same time.  Otherwise their conversations and interactions are clipped and disconnected, their sentences short, their speeches broken and circular, and their eye contact infrequent.

‘You see’ said Lesley Mills enthusiastically in the interval, ‘they all have a plan, but nothing ever comes together.’  And indeed they do; the edgy and volatile Mick has dreams of turning the flat into a penthouse (‘Listen out for the afromosia teak veneer!’ said Lesley); Aston intends to build a shed in the garden if only given the right tools and circumstances; and Davies – Davies has all manner of good intentions if only the weather goes his way and he can procure the right pair of shoes to take him to Sidcup where he can pick up his papers and prove his identity.

It was around the time that Pinter wrote this play that Eric Berne was engaged in writing papers on transactional analysis, but it wasn’t until 1964 that he published ‘The Games People Play’, in which he describes the game of ‘Why Don’t You – Yes But’, which is a mind game in which a helpful person is constantly defeated in their efforts to assist an individual by various excuses which prevent that individual from ever getting a resolution to a particular problem.

Thus it is to some degree with all three characters but is most observable with Davies and his mythical journey to Sidcup.  It’s not about the shoes that the kindly Aston tries to provide him with being never quite right, or the bed he is offered being in the wrong place.  It’s about his fear of responsibility.  Every time he is taken at his boastful word and threatened with anything remotely like a job or a solution to a problem, he becomes visibly vulnerable and backs away.  We never get to find out what if any trauma made him like he is, or what the nightmares are that threaten Aston’s fragile sleep and peace, and he never becomes the caretaker.  Eventually he goes too far in his efforts to drive a wedge between the brothers and in Aston’s words makes ‘too much noise’, and the play ends with the brothers united against a common enemy and Davies protesting in vain about having to leave.

Pinter did consider killing Davies off, but instead chose to have Aston control his demons, Mick smash the pristine Buddha, and the tramp merely consigned to utter darkness.

One of the reasons I went to see this play was to watch Lewis Cowen in the role of Davies, and whilst during his undoubtedly impressive and sensitive performance of tricky stream of consciousness lines and twitchy movements there were many moments where he seemed to disappear and there was only Davies however hard I looked, I do have to say that I was slightly surprised at the amount of prompting he required so far in to the run.

Stuart Mayling did a great job as the imposing and possibly psychopathic Mick, bringing an air of uncertain threat to the room every time he entered and convincingly playing Davies at his own mind games and winning.

But Pete Wallis’s performance as Aston, damaged in the past by a brutal experience of electric shock treatment and taking refuge in a safe life of silence and simple domestic ritual, was a stunning piece of understated genius.  I couldn’t take my eyes off him for the entire time he was on the stage, except for the moment when I had to wipe away a tear during his monologue as he described the clear and quiet sight he had before they put the pincers on him, and I and the audience caught a glimpse of the livelier, albeit less stable, man he may have been before.

There are places in Pinter’s play where people laugh that are supposed to be comedy but aside from the bit of slapstick where the three characters wrestled with the bag and the bit with the drip, I didn’t laugh at all.

Because this is a world that still exists and that some of us recognise.  A timeless, hidden world where people with mental health problems live in rooms full of junk and never quite get anything together.  Either you know about that world or you don’t, and Pinter clearly did.

The Caretaker was without doubt one of the most thought provoking and well executed productions I have seen at The Wharf.

Well done Lewis Cowen, and well done all.

© Gail Foster 4th February 2020