Sensual? This Isabella is as sexy as a bar of soap
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Measure For Measure (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: More half-empty than half-full
Rating: 
Measure For Measure’s heroine, Isabella, is one of the most troublingly alluring figures in drama: the religious looker, the beauty who may become a nun.
Shakespeare makes her tender but brave, aristocratic, pretty enough to yank the lusts of two powerful men.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production has several good points, but director Roxana Silbert miscasts Isabella. Jodie McNee is energetic and has good projection. She is plainly an accomplished actress. Alas, she is no Isabella.
Miscast: Jodie McNee as Isabella, and Raymond Coulthard's Duke
This Isabella is not so much chaste as plain. She looks just like a dutiful, serious nun, no sexier than carbolic soap. Isabella needs to be more than that for the play’s balancing of sensuality and self-control to be humanised.
Miss McNee speaks with a northern accent. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but Isabella’s brother Claudio (pretty Mark Quarterly) speaks RP, as do the rest of the Duke’s court.
When Isabella demands ‘joostice, joostice, joostice’ she sounds less like a Shakespearean gamine than dear old Winifred Robinson making an intervention on Radio 4’s You And Yours.
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ShareRaymond Coulthard enjoys himself as the Duke who goes into disguise having temporarily handed power to his deputy Angelo.
He watches from underneath a friar’s cowl as Angelo abuses his position. Mr Coulthard flashes his eyes and does conjuring tricks, staying just the right side of silliness.
Jamie Ballard is really good as a tense Angelo, forbidden desire churning behind his puritan sterility.
The production has numerous interesting quirks. I loved the music, particularly some chanting by friars and nuns, which is done with rhythmic gusto. Youssef Kerkour does a great cameo as an executioner. Measure For Measure is always a pleasure.
But I was not convinced by two figures who stand at the sides of the stage with lamp-shades on their heads. And why are so many men dressed in corsets? Baffling.
Paul Chahidi’s Lucio needs to be toned down by 5 per cent and the depiction of Vienna’s decadence is not so much an evocation of tempting licentiousness as silly S&M perversion.
The RSC does seem to have a fetish thing going on recently.
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