REVIEW: House + Body’s Measure for Measure weds the beautiful with the troubling
iPhoto caption: Photo by Kendra Epik.
Measure for Measure is a tonally complex comedy — and House + Body mostly keeps tune. This production takes seriously the injuries a corrupt government enacts on human lives and bodies. It’s also surprisingly funny.
In typical Shakespearean fashion, Measure for Measure careens from subjects like justice and hypocrisy to jokes about bums. The play’s infamous dilemma is one of sexual coercion: Angelo (Sébastien Heins) solicits sex from Isabella (Beck Lloyd) in exchange for saving her brother Claudio (Danté Prince) from death. Isabella refuses.
Christopher Manousos’ adaptation of the 1604 comedy adds a metatheatrical twist to the chaos. We aren’t just watching a production of Measure for Measure; we’re watching a production about a production of Measure for Measure, the radio show.
We start in a sound studio, rather than Vienna. The actors file in, shake hands, and shuffle scripts. Chloe (Lloyd) has been cast at the last minute in the role of Isabella. Across the room, she sees the star actress who’ll be playing Mariana (Katherine Gauthier). For a moment, time slows.
Why radio? This was my first question. Entering the theatre, I thought I had an answer: a sound studio setting made sense for the compact black box of the Crow’s Studio Theatre, requiring only four mics and a scattering of Foley props. It soon became clear, however, that this device does much more, enabling the cast to play in the space outside Shakespeare’s script — both physically and metaphorically.
For example: “Enter: Elbow.” Yes, that’s the character’s canonical name. Worse, in this play-within-a-play, the performer cast as Elbow misses her cue. Elbow can’t catch a break and we’re privy to the scrambling that ensues while the (imaginary) radio audience listens unaware.
Elbow’s missed cue gestures toward another benefit of staging Measure for Measure as a radio show: the excuse to verbalize stage directions. With five actors playing 20 roles, potential for confusion looms. Specificity in performance contributes to the impressive legibility of each character — Prince is particularly brilliant in a solo scene where he plays both Lucio and Claudio — but the inclusion of spoken stage directions further detangles knots of double casting and disguise.
To be clear, the House + Body cast acts out the play physically despite its radio show conceit — and, at the right moments, emotional immersion overtakes metatheatrical distance. “Death is a fearful thing” Claudio wails, begging Isabella to save his life. No matter that only minutes ago Gauthier was shuffling a pair of dress shoes with her hands, simulating footsteps for the microphone. Here and now, we fear for Claudio.
These deft shifts in focus are aided by Chris Malkowski’s lighting design, which keeps time with every beat change. Sound design by Riel Reddick-Stevens paces us as well, scoring charged encounters between Lloyd and Gauthier with slow-motion background chatter. Because — spoiler ahead — a love triangle is brewing in the wings (so to speak) of the radio show, culminating in a surprise right before intermission.
While this metatheatrical romance plot works on its own terms, I struggled to read it alongside Shakespeare’s play. In Measure for Measure, Isabella and Mariana perform a bed trick to fool Angelo, at the suggestion of the disguised Duke (Jamie Cavanagh). In their scheme, Mariana takes Isabella’s place in the dark. Surely, it’s significant that the frame narrative involves the same three actors in their own romantic entanglement?
The meta-story seems rather disconnected from the play’s more cynical portrayal of love and sex. Isabella must either yield to Angelo’s unwanted advances to save her brother or allow Claudio to die on principle. The substitution of Mariana’s body for Isabella’s reflects a troubling calculation about which is the lesser sacrifice. Does the romantic frame narrative smooth over these unsettling dynamics before we have time to fully digest them? Possibly.
Then again, imagining desire between the three actors certainly offers a more optimistic avenue for comedic resolution. In my reading of an admittedly ambiguous situation, Heins and Gauthier seem to resolve their marital tension (emblematized in a hilariously petty ad read for shampoo) by embracing a queer relationship. While Shakespeare ends Measure for Measure by pairing up single characters regardless of consent, love, or desire, this throuple follows the opposite logic.
Given its portrayal of the hypocrisy and tyranny intertwined with the policing of sexuality, Measure for Measure is a prescient choice for production; I’m thinking of the widespread political attacks on 2SLGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights, particularly in the United States. House + Body provides few answers about how to resist (or further, dismantle) a corrupt government. But layered portrayals of the play’s central characters — yes, even Angelo — convey the emotional stakes of a system that allows for egregious abuses of power. This is a show that marries the beautiful with the troubling, creating a world as weird as the one we live in.
Measure for Measure runs at Crow’s Theatre until March 16. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Ferron Delcy
Ferron Delcy is pursuing her PhD in early modern literature at the University of Toronto. In 2024, Ferron participated in the New Young Reviewers program facilitated by Toronto Fringe and Intermission. She is a big fan of ghost stories, fog machines, and weird metaphors.
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