With its emphasis on political corruption Shakespeare’s complex comedy is very much a play for today. Michael Attenborough’s modern-dress production is clear, coherent and very good on individual psychology, although it doesn’t pursue the contemporary resonances as rigorously as recent versions.
It does suggest a strong symbiotic connection between Angelo and Isabella, who are both seen as flawed moral extremists. As Angelo, the puritanical deputy assigned to clean up Vienna, Rory Kinnear is outstanding. He first seems a shy bureaucrat astonished by his promotion. Once installed, he visibly grows in authority and then finds himself stunned when Isabella comes to plead for her brother’s life. Where most Angelos are propelled by lust, Kinnear’s is smitten by love. He sighs that Isabella may see him “at any time” and studiously swaps his specs for contact lenses to make a good impression. This doesn’t excuse the sexual bargain he suggests, but it does suggest that Angelo is a man floundering in unfamiliar emotional territory.
He is attracted to Anna Maxwell Martin’s excellent Isabella because of her single-minded moral purity. It is easy for the character to seem a prig in her refusal to exchange her virginity for her brother’s survival.
She is played as a mirror-image of Angelo – a fierce absolutist forced to wake up to new experience. Her cry of “more than our brother is our chastity” is delivered as a plea to heaven rather than a ringing assertion. She also agrees to the notorious bed trick with a haste born of innocence. And, in the final act, after she has sued for mercy for the fallen Angelo, they stare at each other as if realising theirs would be a natural union.
