Interview by Joseph Roberts

Common Ground: You are directing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at Bard on the Beach this year. What do you feel Shakespeare wanted to communicate with this play?
Kathryn Shaw: That’s an interesting question, which has been hotly debated over the centuries. It’s considered a “problem play,” a play that doesn’t come up with easy answers, where you’re not easily satisfied at the end. It also bridges different classifications.
Although in the first folio the play is listed as a comedy, it’s hardly considered a laugh-riot comedy. It gets the comedic designation primarily because people supposedly get married off in the end, which is one of the classic delineations for comedy vs. other genres. It doesn’t really fit there though, partly because at the end of the play, although these people are sort of married off, Isabella is proposed to twice by the Duke and doesn’t accept him as Shakespeare has written it. So that’s left it wide open to interpretation about what’s actually happening at the end. Does she accept or not? Is she forced to accept? All these issues arise.
Then there's another couple: Angelo has abused his power the most blatantly, and the one who made the indecent proposition to Isabella that if she'll sleep with him, he'll allow her brother to live. She's a novitiate about to enter the nunnery, and her brother has been condemned through a law that's been dredged up about fornication outside of marriage being punishable by death. In fact, Angelo asks her to do the very thing for which he has condemned her brother to death.
We find out later that Angelo, who's been put in charge – he is considered a paragon of decency and uprightness in the state – has not only made this indecent proposal to Isabella, but, in fact, five years before, he left another woman, who he was contracted to marry, because her dowry was lost when her brother drowned with it at sea. Then he spread rumours that he left her because she was unchaste and unworthy of him. So we have this rather despicable character, who has a very high position in society. In my version of the play, he's at the top of the military chain.
At the end, there's a “bed trick,” which happens in some plays, and he is married off to the woman he was originally engaged to, in whom, of course, he has absolutely no interest. And she is now married to this man, who clearly has all these flaws. You can hardly consider that a happy ending.
That's why it's a problem play; it's called a comedy, but, in fact, it doesn't end happily. Christopher Gaze, the artistic director, chose the play because it's very powerful. It brings up lots of important issues and had only been performed at Bard on the Beach once before.
CG: How do you see Measure for Measure relating to the current abuse of power in the world?
KS: I think it has a very strong relationship. I've set this play in the 1930s. I wanted something that was contemporary enough that we could make associations with what's going on now. Basically, Angelo's a military man who abuses his power. He picks out laws, saying he's going to do things in the name of public good, which, to me, has a resonance with what's happening in the US particularly, and to some degree in Canada.
In the name of the public good, we're taking away people's rights – inspiring people to fear in the name of saving us from terrorism. I'm not convinced these things are necessary, at least to the degree to which they're being enforced. So that's a correlation between this play and what's happening in the world today. Then there's the ongoing abuse of women, using them for unsupportable ends over the centuries. There's a parallel there with the play, and it seems to be continuing today.
CG: Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, recently spoke in Vancouver. She is now protesting the war. Her son signed up on the promise that he'd be put into the chaplain service and wouldn't have to fight. Our current new federal Conservative government seems to be putting more energy into supporting the war in Afghanistan than into childcare at home.
There are so many instances of the abuse of power here, with more than we know going on behind the scenes, affecting people of all strata. There is so much lying to the very people who are asking for honesty from their leaders.
KS: I think that's very much what happens in Measure for Measure. Angelo is considered a model of righteousness and morally pure, and he turns out to be completely the opposite: an avaricious, lustful, deceitful human being who will take advantage of anybody and anything in order to get what he wants.
Some of the Duke's actions are pretty questionable as well. He's not as obvious as Angelo, but he's running around dressed up as a friar. He does some unforgivable things in my opinion. For example, behind the scenes he saves Isabella's brother but substitutes someone else's head instead. But he doesn't tell Isabella her brother is still alive; he lets her go on thinking he's dead.
CG: Is it like The Da Vinci Code, where actors appear to be one thing, when, in fact, they're giving a very different message? It's very radical and heretical, but it's cloaked in the trappings of the church or the state. Would you say there's some of that going on here?
KS: Oh, absolutely. Isabella would not go along with the things the Duke suggests if he were not posing as a friar. In the hierarchy of the church, the friar is higher than she is. She isn't even a full-fledged nun yet. So she's looking to him for direction and assumes he's not spiritually going to lead her astray, even though that's exactly what he does, because he has a completely different agenda. He does say, "Judge as you expect to be judged," but...
CG: When was the play written?
KS: 1604.
CG: That's after the slaughter of the Cathars in the Languedoc when the Catholic Church hired Polish missionaries to go through Southern France and kill the competing so-called good Christians. The famous quote from the Polish military person, a proxy hired to do the dirty work of the rich people, who happened to be the Vatican at that time, when he came to a village and said, "How will we tell the true Catholics from the heretics?" The reply was, "Slaughter them all and let God decide." That was a terrible abuse of power.
KS: We don't have mass murder in this play, but it's a pretty outrageous edict that any fornication outside marriage is punishable by death. The reason Isabella's brother gets caught is because his girlfriend is very obviously pregnant, and they were engaged but they had money problems and didn't manage to get married.
CG: So once again the dowry comes into play.
KS: And, of course, at the time this was going on, even though there was a law on the books, it wasn't being enforced so nobody worried about it. I think of Stephen Harper's mandatory minimum sentencing as another example of an extremity that is unnecessary. Nobody wants dangerous people running around the streets, but in the US, mandatory minimum sentences have been a disaster in many cases, and also have made an entire society based on incarcerating people. One of the big growth industries in the US is prison.
By their own admission, the Conservatives are saying they will have to build a lot more prisons. That to me is not the solution if you can't take extenuating circumstances into consideration, like a first offence, or a judge is not able to actually show mercy or compassion and understand motivations behind behaviour. It doesn't require Draconian measures.
So, that's what's happening with Angelo. He's saying the law's the law. There's that resonance today as well with Measure for Measure. What is the nature of justice and how is it best observed.
What I find fascinating about Shakespeare is the absolute timelessness of this man's plays. What he wrote 400 years ago has direct application to what's happening today. In some ways that's depressing, because nothing's changed, but he puts it out there on the table and I think he makes us ask those questions. He makes us ask whether our leaders are who they really seem to be. Are they telling us the truth? He continues to ask some of those hard questions that are still relevant today. Who's abusing power now?
Kathryn Shaw has been the artistic director of Studio 58, the professional acting training program at Langara College since 1985, and has been teaching in the program since 1974. In 2005, Kathryn was elected to the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame and was the 1996 recipient of the UBCP/ACTRA Sam Payne Award.
Measure for Measure previews June 14-16 and opens June 17, running through to September 23 at Bard on the Beach at Vanier Park. Phone 604-739-0559 or visit
www.bardonthebeach.org for scheduled times.