Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon: Summer and Winter 2003-2004

The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2003 "festival season" in Stratford (no longer specified as "summer") extended from 6 March to 8 November. There were four plays in the main house: The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus. In the Swan, Fletcher's The Woman's Prize (billed sensibly enough as The Tamer Tamed) was followed by Ibsen's Brand, As You Like It, and Cymbeline. In the 2003-2004 "winter season" The Beauty and the Beast, written and directed by Laurence Boswell, occupied the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 1 December through 22 February, and the Swan had Gregory Doran's productions of All's Well That Ends Well (3 December-7 February) and Othello (11 February-3 April). Elements of this season represented arrangements made during the directorship of Adrian Noble: his own production of Brand, with Ralph Fiennes, was a co-production with two commercial managements, and the two wintertime Swan plays were co-productions with Thelma Holt.

Among the recurring problems for the RSC since its inception has been a conflict between the duty to provide a public service and the necessity of doing so without adequate public funding. Colin Chambers's Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution (2004) gives an admirably concise, deeply felt account of the contradictions and vicissitudes that have frustrated impulses toward social and artistic radicalism. During the last years of the Noble regime, when managerial policies fragmented any sense of "company" beyond a weakened brand identity, the RSC seemed to have abandoned the notion of a coherent repertoire that would fill the available seasons in Stratford and London. The 2003-2004 seasons, admittedly early days for the new Michael Boyd directorate, provided a more fully worked-out artistic plan while allowing Boyd time to consider the options. By not directing a production himself, and by making real attempts to listen and talk with company members and other interested parties, Boyd made a definitive break with what had become a culture of secrecy, where spin had replaced effective consultation and ruthless managerial behavior had reduced company morale to an all-time low. From a reviewer's perspective, it has been increasingly difficult to write appreciatively of the good work done in a system so inimical to good artistic policy—which in the case of a subsidized national company ought also to be good social policy. Pleasing audiences, however admirable in itself, is not the same as engaging with the needs of the public in the largest sense. As it happened, the 2003-2004 seasons exemplified both the range of possibilities in "mainstream" stage Shakespeare and some of its limitations.

Measure for Measure, which opened the summer season, was a grim affair. There was no warmth in the low-life of this Vienna, which evoked the damaged and divided city of The Third Man. In the 1949 film, Vienna has a thriving black market that delivers luxury goods and everyday items that the devalued official currency can't buy. Harry Lime trades in a more sinister commodity, adulterated penicillin, but as a racketeer, he is only a deadlier version of petty traffickers in antiques, nylons, cigarettes, and toothpaste. Like Graham Greene's other tales of compromised integrity, the film has a strong sense of a city and society—as well as individuals—fallen from grace.

How might this ambience fit Measure for Measure? The opening of Sean Holmes's production, with its permanent set of a sloping empty stage, a lowering-sky backdrop, and one, grayish brick wall, evoked some sense of Harry Lime's Vienna: the Duke (Paul Higgins) was leaving—to appropriate sound effects—from what a sign identified as "Wien—Westbanhof," the station where Holly Martins arrives in the film. Lucio (John Lloyd Fillingham), nattily dressed and with something of the suave, slightly camp manner of the film's Baron Kurtz, discussed affairs of state with two demobilized soldiers selling contraband goods set out on trays in front of them. Mistress Overdone (Ishia Bennison), in her fur stole, smart suit, and high heels, was a madam masquerading...