Edward II, and: Measure for Measure (review)

Artistic Director Richard Monette designed Stratford Festival of Canada's 2005 season with a "Saints and Sinners" theme, and two late-season productions provided insights into the connections between sex and violence. Monette himself directed Christopher Marlowe's Edward II in the Festival's stripped-down Studio Theatre and Leon Rubin directed a modernized Measure for Measure—all urban degradation in neon and cold steel—in the black-box Tom Patterson Theatre, twice the size of the Studio but still intimate with seats surrounding on three sides the narrow runway of a stage.

Monette's vision of Edward II featured standard period costuming—medieval 14^th century warriors with a touch of Elizabethan doublet and hose—with the exception of the King's beloved, Piers Gaveston. The shirtless Gaveston strutted across the stage clad in black leather, a medallion around his neck, as if he had emerged from a modern gay dance club. His hair a sloppy afro, he addressed the audience then rushed into the seats to deliver sarcastic asides. His interaction with King Edward was all physical lust: they knelt together and kissed several times before Edward wrapped Gaveston in his kingly robes and mounted him in feigned sodomy.

Monette's blocking tended to position the nobles against the King like a firing squad, sometimes half-encircling him, at other times turning their backs on him in disgust. When Isabella confronted Edward, Gaveston sat at the King's side in her place, and they kissed while Edward pawed at Gaveston's crotch. When the two lovers stood to confront their accusers, they faced upstage so the audience was aware of Gaveston's constant caress of the royal behind. In an incisive counterpoint, the mortified nobles again turned away when, moments later, Isabella lustily embraced Mortimer.

There was no pretense of deep feelings between Edward and Gaveston. Their relationship was entirely carnal. Early on, while the nobles signed their rebellious allegiance in downstage lamplight, the King, Gaveston and a group of nearly naked young men cavorted in the small upper-balcony space: undulating, swigging from liquor bottles, and pantomiming sex acts. After Gaveston was captured and executed, Edward mourned briefly, quick to replace his sexual favorite with the eager Spencer. Edward donned the crown and retrieved his fallen sword, then kissed Spencer passionately on the mouth. Spencer giggled, seized a herald by the neck and snapped a banner pole in two.

Like Edward II's sexually deviant court, the modern Vienna of Measure for Measure was a sordid milieu, filled with bored prostitutes and seedy customers. Neon signs surrounded the stage—blue "Vanity," orange "Sin Tax," red "Hottie"—and amid pulsating lights and throbbing club music, garishly made-up strippers in leather and lace gyrated along poles, within cages and from a hanging trapeze bar; two of them pantomimed sex inside a large metal hoop suspended over the stage. Stage fog swirled, liquor was served from an upstage bar, and young clubbers worked the front row of the audience, chatting with patrons as the Duke watched from a private table. A group of outraged nuns appeared upstage but pulled off their habits to reveal themselves as lithe young strippers, and they gyrated and thrashed to wild applause. The crowd's roar extended to a...