The Guardian
by Michael Billington, 20 June 1994

Forget Vienna. Declan Donnellan's brilliant Cheek by Jowl production of Measure for Measure at the Lyric Hammersmith anchors the play in a specifically English world of sexual guilt, public hypocrisy and punishment -- fixation. I would seriously suggest that complimentary tickets be issued to members of the present Cabinet for any night of their choice.

Far from narrowing the play down, Donnellan opens it up and his greatest insight is to realise that the Duke and Angelo, far from being temperamental opposites are two sides of the same puritan coin. Stephen Boxer plays the former superbly as an upright and moral coward who having presided over 14 years of misrule, leaves it to his deputy to sort out the resulting chaos.

I've also never seen the point so clearly made that the Duke is Angelo's double in his furtive attraction to Isabella who represents the sexual temptations of corrective chastity. And in the last act, Boxer, in jaunty titfer and camel coat, seems less God's agent than a power-mad fixer pairing off disastrously ill-suited couples in the name of justice and social conformity.

But Donnellan pursues his central idea that politicians who seek to legislate for private morality expose their own internal hypocrisy with rigorous logic. Adam Kotz's Angelo is a sober suited figure both fascinated and appalled by the itch lurking inside his trousers. And Anastasia Hille plays Isabella marvellously, not as frigid noviciate but as a passionate woman who nestles in Angelo's arms and who subconsciously equates punishment and sex. The key to this Isabella is not the notorious "more than our brother is our chastity" but the lines where she claims that were she under sentence of death, "Th'impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies."

Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod also create a totally plausible work on stage, one dominated by a central desk, steel chair and an overhanging working light. Only the suspended, implicitly fascist red banner strikes me as gratuitous. But the stage picture is constantly striking so that we are reminded throughout of the imprisoned presence of the doomed Claudio (Danny Sapani) who has to battle against his sister's voluble prayers to plead for his life. There is, in fact, a score of inventive touches, from Malcolm Scates' Elbow misreading his notebook when giving court evidence to an impromptu shriek of "What?" from Marianne Jean-Baptiste's bluesy Mariana when the bed trick is proposed. Veteran Charles Simon who performed with Frank Benson, intriguingly makes Escalus both a figure of unregenerate humanism and a chain smoker, clearly some liberties survive even in the world of puritan hypocrisy that Donnellan, staying true to Shakespeare, has so breathtakingly evoked.