What the Productions Looked Like: The Designers’ View

Abstract

Like several Shakespeare comedies, Measure for Measure has frequently been performed in historical or geographical locations far from the Vienna (or London) of the early seventeenth century. In 1975 there were two productions which picked up the suggestive notion of setting a play involving sexual repression in Vienna. Robin Phillips at Stratford, Ontario, placed it before the First World War in the city of Mahler and Arthur Schnitzler; Jonathan Miller at the Greenwich Theatre, London, set it a quarter of a century later in a Freudian Vienna with serial music. More recently, in 1981 a National Theatre production by Michael Rudman was set on a post-colonial Caribbean island, with a lethargic ruler, a clerical Angelo, some street-wise shanty-town dwellers, and a few white officials such as Escalus and the Provost ‘staying on’.