For the past year, since the eruption of the
#MeToo
movement right up to the recent
Brett Kavanaugh
debacle, the public discourse has been continually focused on the bitter state of play between men and women. The damning notion of “the patriarchy” has become our daily bread, the phrase “toxic masculinity” the added scalding chilli.
In its invitation to open-mindedness and capacity to bring people together, theatre offers the ideal medium to thrust questions about power and gender into the limelight. Yet, while there’s a feminist wave crashing across our stages, what’s been missing is an urgent play that gets to the nub of the subject of sexual harassment.
Well, wouldn’t you just guess it, Shakespeare ? much seized on to catch the tumultuous political moment with Julius Caesar ? has turned up trumps again, courtesy of a work that at one level seems utterly removed from our own times, and yet, thanks to the canny intervention of
Josie Rourke
, artistic director of the
Donmar
, now seems to speak to the post-
Weinstein
, post-Kavanaugh gulf between the sexes.
The plot of Measure for Measure is elaborate, and artful. The Duke of Vienna, aghast that his city has descended into debauchery, embarks on a crackdown ? entailing the merciless application of the law, capital punishment included. Allowing himself to stay untainted, he appoints a proxy ? his deputy, a figure of sexless self-restraint ? only to realise, as he stalks the scene incognito, that his substitute’s virtue is a sham. A man condemned to death for impregnating his intended is used by the upstart as a bargaining chip, and the devout relation who pleads for clemency is given a stark choice: submit to sex, or your brother dies.